SeeLight

Wow

Da Nobble is about to hit the 200k word mark.

That's a lot. In traditional pages it's between 670 and 800 pages. That's a lot.

Wow, that's a lot. And I still have more to add.

Shut Up, Gerry

Oh. My. God.

I swear to you, I swear, Geraldine Ferraro is on either the McCain payroll, or crack. Observe (emphases all mine):

Here we are at the end of the primary season, and the effects of racism and sexism on the campaign have resulted in a split within the Democratic Party that will not be easy to heal before election day. Perhaps it's because neither the Barack Obama campaign nor the media seem to understand what is at the heart of the anger on the part of women who feel that Hillary Clinton was treated unfairly because she is a woman or what is fueling the concern of Reagan Democrats for whom sexism isn't an issue, but reverse racism is.

Note the lack of scarequotes around "reverse racism." Yes, she's using the term seriously. It gets worse:

As for Reagan Democrats, how Clinton was treated is not their issue. They are more concerned with how they have been treated. Since March, when I was accused of being racist for a statement I made about the influence of blacks on Obama's historic campaign, people have been stopping me to express a common sentiment: If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They see Obama's playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening. They're not upset with Obama because he's black; they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because they're white. It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial resentment. And that is enforced because they don't believe he understands them an their problems. That when he said in South Carolina after his victory "Our Time Has Come" they believe he is telling them that their time has passed.

Wow. Just ... wow. I almost wanted to write that she doesn't get it, but she does get it ... or would be getting it if she were writing those words on behalf of blacks instead of random, unnamed whites. But wait, there's more:

Whom he chooses for his vice president makes no difference to them. That he is pro-choice means little. Learning more about his bio doesn't do it. They don't identify with someone who has gone to Columbia and Harvard Law School and is married to a Princeton-Harvard Law graduate. His experience with an educated single mother and being raised by middle class grandparents is not something they can empathize with. They may lack a formal higher education, but they're not stupid. What they're waiting for is assurance that an Obama administration won't leave them behind.

Seriously? What does she think she's doing here? Telling people what to think? Fortunately, as we discovered during Hillary's campaign, nobody's listening. Will somebody please shut her up before anyone starts?

And to think, I voted for her. Well, no I didn't, really, only in my high school fake election. But still.

Mishima and Bodybuilding

You're welcome.

A Note

I just realized that, as I've been reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities for a month now, it's been a month since I read a novel.

And I haven't missed it.

Something's wrong here.

Pass It On

Take it and pass it on, folks!

Martian Territory Law Updated

Of course it would be in the National Review, in Bush's early years, that some idiot would write an article calling on the US to opt out of the 1967 international treaty agreeing to no national sovereignity claims in space.

The post argues that article II of the treaty does American interests "harm," although it never specifies what that harm is. Apparently, because article II was intended to restrict funding to NASA (and succeeded), that means we should repudiate it now.

Now we find ourselves in an entirely different world. The Soviet Union is no more. Mars, it         turns out, has far more water than we previously suspected: enough to support colonies, and even programs aimed at giving it a climate more hospitable to humans. The reward for going to Mars has increased dramatically.

Um, okay ... and what was that reward again? I mean, aside from learning how to keep people who leave Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field for extended periods from dying of radiation sickness? Or maybe giving science fiction writers more jazz? Or maybe sheer excitement?

People, people, we're not looking at a viable alternative living space here. To terraform Mars would require more Earth resources than it would produce or maintain ... probably ever. The potential mineral resources might be attractive ... assuming the iron and nickel are even there in a useful form ... if we needed iron and nickel that badly ... which we don't. But we don't know how to power spaceships without fossil fuels--something that we may well run out of in the next century--and transportation of any resources from Mars would far outcost the resources themselves.

How can conservatives NOT understand the liberal tendency to see them as crazy, greedy, and pathologically nationalistic, when a typical conservative response to a renewal of funding in space exploration is a call to claim sovereignity over unviable and as-yet unreachable territories in contravention of law, common sense, and even imagination?

I want to hit my head against a wall repeatedly, but this attitude is exactly what I need to understand for da nobble, which of course takes place on a Mars already claimed as a territory by the US.

***** UPDATE

oo. Missed this is in the first sweep. Here's an actual PIRG guy (albeit from Texas) advocating the creation of an International Agency for the Development of Mars to enable the selling of Martian territory to private individuals to spur the development and settling of human colonies on Mars.

Again, why? I dunno, but this guy gives more of an answer than the previous dudes:

The IADM should be structured so as to allow ordinary citizens to purchase land shares and prevent all of the shares from being gobbled up by governments and corporations. If this is successfully done, I think it’s possible that we will see a rebirth of a social drive which has been largely extinct for the last century: the push for the frontier. In an increasingly bland, stratified, and commercialized world, the desire to strike out on one’s own, to build a new home even in a harsh and unforgiving environment, will again come to the fore. By mid-century, I wouldn’t be surprised to see restless and adventurous people, the spiritual descendents of the American pioneers, buying Martian land with the full intention of settling it themselves.

Why now? Well, because our world is  "increasingly bland, stratified, and commercialized," and the best solution to this is to create a new frontier and get our manifest destiny flowing again, not, you know, to use our imaginations or to fix our problems or anything.

I say "Mars!" You say "Dumbass!"

Mars!

Dumbass!

Mars!

Dumbass!

Today

was my last day at my formal job. Tomorrow I begin working for myself. Woo hoo!

I'm Dying

Birthday

Sigh. My birthday today and it's RAINING and GREY.

Nothing to do but be naughty.

My present to myself today will be to get some writing done, even if it's crappy.

666 Comments

A Dangerous Time, people. I have exactly 666 comments on this blog. Somebody break the tension!

It Must Be A Fake

'Cause if it's real I'll just diiiiieeeeee!

Hybridity is never this neat ... is it?

via Cute Overload, of course.

Theme for 2008

As my boss said on the work blog I edit:

A wise colleague told me this week that she doesn’t make resolutions, she creates a theme for the year. So here is our theme for the year; GET THE MESSAGE OUT!

Which gave me to think. I've made my goals/resolutions for the year, but what is my theme?

Well, it'll have to be something about enjoyment, about working hard and achieving goals, about realistic expectations but high ambitions, and about building home and family (further). That's complicated. I don't know if I can fit that into a single slogan.

So maybe not a slogan so much as an exhortation: ... be present? Build community? Work hard? Live happily?

No, there's too much going on for me to balance this year (and every year) for me to reduce it to any one single thing. I suppose that at the moment I'm incapable of a simple life. I don't even want a simple life, although I'd like one that doesn't defeat me with its endless, crying minutiae.

So, no theme for 2008, unless it is: Get It Together! But that's the theme of my LIFE.

Other Writahs

It's funny, but I get along best with other writers, particularly fiction writers, on the internet.

I have writers among my friends but most of those are poets, or writer/artists/performers, or playwrights, or whatever. And most of my friends are visual artists or performers or whatever---not writers. And it's not that I don't like the fiction writers I know ... I really tend to like them, even the ones who aren't such good writers :P

Problem is, they don't seem to like me.

Small wonder, given the last sentence of the previous paragraph. I don't pull punches when I evaluate work in public--this very blog is a veritable grave of potential friendships, no doubt. And writers are, in my sincere opinion, more touchy about their work than any other kind of artist. So that could be it.

But I'm not so sure that that's it.

Does anyone else have the paranoid impression that they can't get along with other writers of their genre or discipline? I seem to do best with y'all when having blogversations, which are necessarily distancing. What sayest thou?

An Admission

I am not ready to commit to a blog post at this time.

Diabulimia

I was horrified to read this article in Salon about Diabulimia, a new eating disorder that affects only Type 1 diabetics like myself.

As I wrote in the previous post, when you have full blown diabetes, you'll eat carbs but not be able to use them, so you'll be essentially starving to death. And yes, you'll lose a lot of weight. The four big symptoms of diabetes are: excessive thirst, excessive urination, extreme weight loss, and blurred vision.

This article talks about young girls and women who are Type 1 diabetics who use diabetes to lose weight. Yep, that's right, they starve themselves while eating tons of food. As long as they don' t eat fat or protein, they'll lose weight quickly.

The thing the article doesn't mention in much detail, presumably because the writer isn't diabetic, is how awful hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) feels. When you don't take your insulin but still eat, you have tons of unused sugar running around your system. It doesn't just run innocently around, though. It collects where it shouldn't.

Like in your eyes, for example. The blurred vision? That's you going blind. It takes a few years, but unchecked hyperglycemia deposits destructive sugar in the blood vessels in your eyes, which then burst from the pressure, damaging your retina.

Or in your kidneys, putting pressure on them. Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney failure. Why? Because your body tries to flush out this destructive loose sugar and you have to pee, literally, every fifteen minutes, and are thirsty all the time. Processing all that sugar destroys your kidneys.

Your eyes feel swollen and you can't see properly, even with glasses. You're thirsty and can't quench your thirst no matter how much you drink. It's like a Greek version of Hell. You can't move far away from a bathroom or you'll pee your pants. Your joints feel like they're swollen, your head feels like it's swollen, and gravity is stronger. You're so tired you can't walk very far without having to sit down and rest. Your heart races all the time and you're breathless with any exertion. You just feel sick. Constantly, so that, although you're tired all the time, you can't sleep.

It's horrible.

And that's just the direct effects. Secondarily, yeast and fungi loooove sugar, remember? So you get yeast infections. Yes, even the guys. Guys, did you know you could get yeast infections in any warm, moist body crease? Ladies, imagine a yeast infection that just. won't. go. away. Also, itchy skin infections.

Cuts don't heal and get infected easily. Tattoos are clearly out. And you're more susceptible to other diseases, especially bacterial ones.

It's gross, it feels terrible, and your quality of life is shit.

This is why it horrifies me that girls can hate their bodies so much that they'd put themselves through this hell just to look thin.

What is this world coming to?

Frozen in Mild Terror

Can't write. Trying to Unlock.

Come See Me Read!

Hey there, all! Yes, it's Litquake time again! Yes, I'm reading again during the very cool Lit Crawl. I'll be in Phase III from 8 to 8:45:

Mission Laundromat, 3282 22nd Street Lit Journals: Authors from On the Page and Tea Party Magazines Blair Campbell, Deborah Crooks, John Dylan Keith, Clara Hsu, Claire Light, Craig Santos Perez

Hope to see some of you out and about that night! I might even ... we'll see ... do a "blog reading," an as yet undefined type of performance which I might not have time to experiment with. We'll see ...

Today

Genuinely despairing of people's ability to actually communicate with each other. This week I've had several severe episodes of miscommunication and failure to engage. I really just want to turn the noise off for a while and go off to a desert island somewhere.

It'll be better tomorrow.

Road Rape

Well, I didn't have much to say about McCarthy's The Road at first. It packs such an emotional wallop that it's hard to (hard to want to) analyze or even think about. But as time went by, I was more and more bugged by the tremendous (if par for the course) misogyny of the book.

I mean, it's a father and son, for the whole book. and all they encounter--to speak to, to act with or against--are men. As the book progresses, the absence of the boy's mother grows heavier and heavier until her absence is finally explained: she gives up, and wanders off out of camp to die alone.

And what is her argument? Well, that she fears being raped, of course--and her son being raped, naturally.

Naturally. In Cormac McCarthy's world, rape is still a Fate Worse Than Death. The whole world has died, cannibals are roaming the Earth, there's no hope, and she's worried about being raped.

As if her husband wouldn't be just as raped in such a world.

My ogd, can McCarthy simply not conceive of women strong enough to survive a holocaust the way the men here have? Can he somehow not imagine women banding together, or even together with men, to form less predatory groups?

Arg. That's it. I'm not reading any more McCarthy. I was feeling emotionally devastated by the book at first, but as time goes by it just makes me feel dirtier and dirtier, and more and more tired of it, and less and less inclined to think about it. It's apocalypse porn, looking for the most horrific thrills: keeping people alive to eat them slowly, or bringing a pregnant woman with you so you can eat her baby when its born (and what happened to the pregger woman once her baby was born, anyway? She just disappears.)

Argh! I'm done! McCarthy can go hate women off in his little southerly corner and leave me alone!

Peeg 'n' Patrick

Dude, me neither.

Munny, or Our Fucked Up Society Part 5673

I'm a professional fundraiser for a nonprofit organization.

How fucked up is that?

It just hit me. I'm sitting here in a cafe, killing an hour before I go to a meeting at another nonprofit organization (where I will be giving my work for free), and I pulled out a book to read, one I'm reading to be better able to raise funds for yet another nonprofit organization where I also give my work for free.

I was just at the Craigslist Nonprofit Bootcamp in the Bay Area two weekends ago and the keynote speaker pointed out that nonprofit people are more obsessed with money than businesspeople. Yeah, even the ones who deal with money.

And it's true. Our society is so centered around money, that any endeavor that doesn't have money-making at its heart has to spend more time proving its money-worthiness than for-profit endeavors. This includes academia, social service (both government and private), arts and culture at all levels, etc.

How fucked up is that?

How fucked up is it that someone at my organization spent money buying a book that teaches us how to convince people to give us money so that we don't have to be concerned about earning it? How fucked up is it that convincing people to be generous for a good cause is an industry? How fucked up is it that all of my friends--all of them--that I met doing nonprofit work, who have stayed in nonprofit work, have all ended up going into some aspect of nonprofit development or funding, because that's the logical step when you get good at what you do?

Of course, it makes sense that money is at the center of everything because, although it behaves erratically, money is the only measurable quantity of any importance in our lives. The moment you point out anything else measurable--the amount of a harvest, the loss of polar ice, the progress of a student ... or of a disease--its meaning--or meaningfulness--can be directly translated into a currency amount.

Which means the obvious, of course: that money has many layers and regions of meaning, and its behavior and idiom are bigger than we give it credit for on a day-to-day basis. (Sidetrack: note the use of "credit" in the previous sentence, i.e. a promissory monetary value.) Money is neither simply a strange and arbitrary evil at the root of all social ills, nor simply a way--the way--we assess and assign value to objects, labor, and processes.

There are a number of layers of meaning even within the simple process of raising funds for a nonprofit. For example, my current place of work has an extremely healthy system of funding streams, because they are diverse, and because the org keeps a good staff around to continually expand on existing streams and look for and establish new ones. Also, within each stream (say: individual giving, or private foundations) we have a very diverse population of donors and funders, from the very small and limited to the very wealthy and large.

This is because our mission and programs appeal to a very diverse set of people, yes, but it also means that we are able to articulate a vision of our mission and programs that appeals to a diversity of folks. And it also means that the need to appeal to a diverse set of people causes us to articulate an appealing and layered vision of our mission and program. And it also means that the need to articulate an appealing and layered vision of our mission and program forces us to have an appealing and layered mission and program, as well.

Do you like the palindrome nature of that argument? Which came first: the programmatic value or the healthy funding streams?

Ask that question of businesses as well. Which came first: the great business plan or the venture capital? Any dilettante will tell you that you can't get capital without a great biz plan, but can you create a great biz plan without knowing who it is that might fund you?

Ask that of great art. The masterpieces of 500 years ago were all commissioned. Think about that for a second. "Here's some money. Paint something on that wall that will brighten up the room and make me look wealthy." Why can't that be the straw that builds the camel's headdress? Or the new grant the Moneybags Foundation created for a specific purpose: why can't that grant be the thing that causes today's artist to take a simple step out of the comfort zone and into something great?

(Who am I arguing with? Myself?)

It's also not a simple bilateral assignment of value: good/bad; yes/no. Proclaiming an endeavor can start the money flowing, but only fulfilling the promise can keep it coming or increase it. So you shape a mission/program that will appeal to a diversity and then you have to start spinning plates. It's the desire of the diverse funding sources that you be this, that and the other thing ... plus, that thing over there, too. So you say you will. And if you're successful in being those things, very often what you've proven is not your essential virtue, but rather your ability to balance competing demands.

And this is one of the aspects of a healthy organization: the ability to balance a variety of equally urgent demands and satisfy them all. In this way, funding can both stimulate the development of an essential success skill that can be applied to all aspects of the org, and also measure and reward the development of that skill.

A bad org--or artist--or researcher--will create a program based on the stated desires of funders, so you don't want to do that. In that way, money corrupts--and it does so easily and thoroughly. And as time goes on and the corruption (otherwise known as "mission drift") works its black magic, the org's mission and programs become less coherent and successful and the funders leave the building. So an organization unable to maintain its essential purpose against the temptation of easy money is found out. No matter what people may think of their own judgment, hardened bullshit can be very hard to detect. But money simply will not flow towards the corrupted mission ... and will flow toward the tended mission, no matter how personally corrupt its gardeners are.

This is story of George W. Bush. He is criticized for staying a course that won't work, but look at his administration from the standpoint of mission, vision, and program. No president since FDR can be said to have evidenced so little mission drift as Dubya. He articulated a vision of his mission and programs which appealed to a diversity of people, and the money flowed toward it and kept flowing. It still hasn't stopped. And has he kept his promises? Fuck yeah. Has he followed his mission? Fuck yeah! Has he established and stabilized the programs he said he would? Fuck yeah! We need more nonprofit E.D.s like him.

Prob is, of course, our society is neither a special interest, nor a business. And running it like one is killing us. But that's a bit too much of a digression now. What was my point?

Oh yeah, money senses both purity and corruption, not of human morality, but rather of stated purpose. Money can't tell you if someone is good or bad, but it can tell you to a nicety if someone is successful and consistent in their goodness or badness.

Money is incredibly sensitive to variations in that value. It's the ultimate liquid, flowing into every possible crevice. And it's the people who deal the most with it--the financiers and appropriaters and uber-comptrollers--who understand this the best. It's also they who fall most easily prey to the idea that money is the only measurement of value. We all know this.

What's difficult to realize is that, although even the smallest child has a grasp of the concept that money isn't the only measurement of value, even the most sophisticated, well-educated adults often don't have a grasp of the simple fact that money is one of the best measurements of social value we've come up with so far.

Not the only one. And certainly not one you would ever want to use in isolation. But one of the best ones? Definitely.

I can't tell you how uncomfortable this train of thought makes me.

One Party System

Seriously, dewds, what do we need two parties for?

I Have Not Stopped Blogging ...

Just slowed down.

Seriously. I'm going to be starting to blog again more regularly later in the summer because I rearranging my life slightly. Will post about it as it happens.

Satisfied, Wendy?

Oh God

... the shooter was Asian, and a foreign national. I really don't wanna see the fallout from this one.

****update*****

Even worse: He's a 1.5. Here we go ...

****update 2*****

"1.5" is between first and second generation. Among European Americans, there's the immigrant generation, and then "first generation" means the first generation to be born in the U.S. Among Asians and Latinos, it's counted differently. First generation is the immigrants. Second generation is the first generation born in the States.

So 1.5's are kids born abroad, but raised mostly or partly in the U.S. I.e., not foreigners, but not born in the U.S.A., either.

This guy is gonna get the "foreigner" treatment for sure, even though he's culturally American--at least to great extent.

****update 3*****

Rebecca at Hyphen magazine rounds up the Asian American freak-out.

Comments On Don Imus Debacle

1. I take back what I've been saying about "at least blacks are no longer treated with as open contempt in the media as Asians are" blah blah. I guess it was said more in wishfulness than in truth.
2. After an hour on Google News, I still haven't found a white commenter who thinks anything other than blacks are overreacting. They're all male. I haven't found any random white women commenting. Is every white male on the internet a privileged cracker? Is every white woman on the internet a fucking ostrich?
3. Oh My God. Why did it take me half an hour on Google to find out about the "Jigaboo" comment? Why did that not merit attention?
4. The white (male) commentary ranges from "You're all reverse racists this is free speech fuck you lynching Don Imus Free speech fuck you!" to (sadly, wryly) "Yeah, he shouldn'ta said it, but it's teh blacks overreacting that gives his comments meaning" (no shit. somebody actually made that argument.)
5. Not a single white male in my search has been found to have the imagination to wonder what the Rutger's women's basketball team members feel about all this ... like maybe are they feeling hurt or insulted. It's all about Don Imus and what he does and doesn't deserve. Can it be that this all comes down to a lack of empathy? Talk about identity politics! Look who's identifying now!
6. It took me all of five minutes to find commentary by "a black man" who thinks teh blacks are overreacting. I don't know which is worse: the possibility that the writer isn't really black, or the possibility that s/he is.
7. I've found every possible breakdown of Imus' comments, saying that this element was offensive and the other wasn't. There was one that said that "ho" was offensive, but "nappy-headed" wasn't. There was one that said that "nappy-headed" was the offending remark. There was one that said that if the comment had been made about, say, that nappy-headed ho Foxy Brown, instead of those fine, upstanding Rutgers wimmin, then no one would have said anything because, let's be honest, she is a nappy-headed ho. There was one that said that the use of "Jigaboo", which the commenter apparently only knew from Do The Right Thing, made the whole radio exchange a grand allusion to Spike Lee, and not a racist insult at all. All of these comments tried to do away with the offensiveness of the whole by placing it "into context" as if there was any context in which two white men talking about a largely black women's basketball team's looks using the terms "nappy-headed ho's" and "Jigaboos vs. Wannabes" might not be offensive.
8. Let me break it down for you again:
   
   • "nappy-headed": no, whites don't get to use it. It's insulting: it's too familiar, it's too racist. And no, you don't get to be arbiter of what teh blacks get to say to each other. Buleeve me, if you bothered to read anything that black people write, you'd already know there's a long-standing and lively discussion of this issue. Your input is not needed.
   • "ho's": no, you don't get to say this about any women, black, white, or ignored. "Ho" is short for "whore", which is insulting slang for "prostitute" and an insult commonly used to deride women, in the belief that a woman's chastity is still important. Once again, black rappers may well be using it. Doesn't mean Don Imus gets to. See above. Plus, who says black rappers get to use it with impunity?
   • "jigaboo": also not okay. No, it's not from Spike Lee. It's an old school racist term on par with the "n-word", only never used as much. There is no universe in which it is not offensive.
   • "context": here's the context, folks. The Rutgers women's basketball team was news because they had just lost a championship game. Imus and pal decided it was appropriate to discuss both the Rutgers players' and their opponents' looks, because they are womenz. They pronounced the Rutgers team "rough-looking" (i.e. not good looking) and backed it up by saying they had tatoos and were "nappy-headed ho's" and "jigaboos". Spot the "ism"! This is racist, sexist, and entirely off topic. There is no way you can tweak this context to make it okay.
9. How long, sweet Jesus, must we sing this song?

(cross-posted at Other Magazine staff blog.)

Modern Day Indentured Servitude

Shailja brought up an issue when she commented on my post about redeploying injured servicemen and women:

Well, as we all know, military recruitment is at an all-time low. The army is beating the bushes for bodies to throw into the Gulf. There have been several articles exposing how army recruiters are signing up kids who don't meet physical and health requirements, telling them to lie about conditions that would disqualify them, encouraging them to throw away their meds.....

Once they've gone to all that trouble to capture them, you don't think they're gonna relinquish them to a few itty-bitty injuries, do you?

The closest analogy I can think of to military service is indentured, or bonded, labor. Which, as I'm hardly the first to point out, is actually modern-day slavery. Slaves don't get to quit when they get injured either.

This is one of those class issues that is impossibly complex. I remember back in 2003 or so I went to a gala for Youth Speaks. As is the custom, they had invited community folks at the last minute to fill up still-empty seats.

I was sitting with a friend during their program when one of the instructors talked about a client of the org, a kid who had just signed up in the army and was going to Iraq. The instructor asked for a hand for the kid and the applause was sparse and extremely unenthusiastic.

I looked around and the audience members who were refusing to clap were mostly white men, middle aged or so, and dressed and held like people of means. I.e.: middle, upper-middle, and upper class. It was really a toss-up whether or not they understood how much their liberal anti-war stance was in tension with the number of opportunities available to low-income teens to rise in the world--or merely to become self-sufficient.

I saw all this, but I also was uncomfortable making a public show of support for a kid who chose to go abroad and kill civilians. Later, during our event post-mortem, my friend, who is from a working class background, thought that I should be more supportive. On his side, he was only thinking about the individual kid and how the kid's best option--in the absence of any colleges beating down his door with full-ride scholarships--might well be the military.

I pointed out that all the upper-middle class protesting in the world wasn't going to do any good if the working class were willing to fight the wars. The "protest class" always gets ignored until they start taking the military class's dinner away. It's easy for someone from privilege, like me, to assign sacrifice to someone from no privilege. But the fact remains that, for this war to end, someone is going to have to sacrifice the advantages the military offers. And, as unfair as it is, that someone will never be me.

So the way the situation is worsening, and the way the Bush administration keeps making politically suicidal decisions about military personnel benefits and treatment, basically they've rendered this impossibly complex issue much less complex, or impossible. For those who have a chance to think about it, the military is no longer an attractive or beneficial option: a near certainty of being deployed to Iraq, a near-certainty of sustaining severe injury and/or severe mental health issues if deployed to Iraq, a very high incidence of rape and sexual harrassment for servicewomen, a near certainty of being redeployed beyond one's term of service, a strong possibility of being redeployed even if injured, a serious reduction of benefits and pay while in service and almost no benefits or healthcare for veterans ... seriously, what the hell does Bush think is going to attract people to sign up?

And now they're recruiting prisoners? That'll make the military more popular.

Of course, recruits and potential recruits are still the losers. Potential recruits are losing possibly their only "way out" of poverty into a skills-building job. And recruits ... well gods help 'em. Maybe after the next election we can do something about what's happening to the military. But for now, two more years of Hell awaits servicemen and women, and maybe a lifetime of Hell afterwards, for their traumatized selves, and for their families, who are at a radically increased risk of domestic abuse.

I'm not (entirely) ashamed to admit that in the past I've accepted the fact that the security we enjoy at home and abroad is owing to the power of our military. But we crossed the line into unacceptable territory years ago. When even our own soldiers are getting no real benefits from being proxy bullies and thugs, even conservative hawks have to admit it's time to dial down the war machine a little bit.

Checklist for Originality in Ethnic Writing

A moving portrait (check) of three generations (check) of the Chan(check) family (check) living (check) in Vancouver’s Chinatown (check)

Sammy (check) Chan was sure she’d escaped her family obligations(check) when she fled Vancouver(check) six years ago, but with her sister’s upcoming marriage(check) , her turn has come to care for their aging mother(check) (check) (check) . Abandoned by all four of her older sisters(check) , jobless (check) and stuck in a city she resents(check) , Sammy finds herself cobbling together a makeshift family history(check) (check) (check) (check) (check) and delving (check) into stories (check) that began in 1913(check) (check) , when her grandfather(check) (check) (check) , Seid Quan(check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) , then eighteen years old, first stepped on Canadian soil.(check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check)

The End of East (check) weaves in and out of the past (check) (check) and the present(check) , picking up the threads (check) f the Chan family’s stories(check) (check) : Seid Quan, whose loneliness (check) in this foreign country(check) is profound (check) (check) even as he joins the Chinatown(check) community(check) ; Shew Lin, whose hopes(check) for (check) her (check) family (check) (check) are threatened by her own misguided actions(check) ; Pon Man, who struggles with obligation and desire(check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) ; and Siu Sang, who tries to be the caregiver (check) everyone expects(check) (check) , even as she feels herself unravelling(check) (check) . And in the background, five little girls (check) (check) grow up (check) (check) (check) under the weight of family expectations(check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) . As the past unfolds around her(check) , Sammy finds herself embroiled(check) in a volatile (check) mixture (check) of a dangerous love affair(check) , a difficult and duty-filled relationship with her mother(check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) (check) , and the still-fresh memories of her father’s (check) long illness.(check) (check) (check)

An exquisite (check) and evocative(check) debut (check) from one of Canada’s bright (check) new(check) literary (check) stars(check) The End (check) of East (check) sets family (check) conflicts (check) against (check) the backdrop (check) of Vancouver’s Chinatown(check) – a city(check) within a city(check) where dreams are shattered a(check) s quickly as t(check) hey’r(check) e bu(check) ilt(check) , (check) an(check) d wher(check) history repeats itself(check) (check) (check) through(check) the generations(check) (check) (check) .

No, I did NOT make this up.

Disgusting

This has to stop.

Wherein I Am Again Appalled

Okay, I'm happily, merrily, writing this on my brand spankin' neue wireless internet service. Yes.

However, I'm ever so slightly disturbed by the fact that the nice, entirely American young man who helped me set up over the phone, called me "Mrs. Light", and then, when I said, "That's 'Ms.'!" came back with "Miss?"

I had to repeat it three times and spell it for him. He'd never heard of it. What the fuck?

Then I called back later with another question and got another nice young man who called me "Miss Light". I let it go.

But seriously, what the fuck?

I got into a shouting match last summer with an Arab immigrant motel manager who insisted on calling me "Miss" and then thought that I was correcting his English when I told him to use "Ms." He'd never heard of it. What. The. Fuck.

At Safeway, where I use my club card, I am invariably thanked as "Miss Light" by everyone, furriner and Amerkin. What the hell is going on? Did I get off at the wrong dimension the last time I woke up from a dream? Has "Ms." not been standard for all business practice for, like, twenty-five years? When did we start rolling back?

And dude, let me remind you, I'm in San Francisco.

What the hell is going on?

Catvacuuming

The honeymoon is over. I've been in this cafe for nearly an hour, reading crap on the internet, in an attempt to avoid getting to my 2K words today. Yep. Writin' a nobble.

Now, for something completely different ...

Distracted By the Combover

So I'm sitting in a cafe right now, rehearsing my arguments for my job interview today (introductory phone interview), and a guy walks into the cafe, with fine, longish dishwater brown hair that looks wrong somehow. He keeps touching it self-consciously.

He passes me and I look back and see that his hair is arranged in a combover, but not a side-to-side combover, but rather a back-to-front combover. Sad thing is, although the dude isn't particularly attractive, he'd be okay if he buzzed his hair into that I'm-going-bald-but-I'm-too-cool-and-tough-to-deny-it-and-don't-you-like-the-shape-of-my-skull-I-look-just-like-Vin-Diesel-okay-not-really-but-I-am-cool style. Yeah, and wore different clothes. And stopped moving like he was a rabbit.

Anyway, it drove my pitch entirely out of my head and now I'm gonna have to start over.

Uh Oh. Now he's sat down in my line of sight. He caught me looking at him, twice, and probably thinks I'm interested. Shit, am I gonna have to leave?

***Update***

Yay! the interview went well and I'm scheduled for an in-person interview next week!

InNoWriMo Tally
Today's Wordcount: 2432
Total Wordcount: 10,293

InNoWriMoPocalypse Now

Okay, so after writing the InNoWriMo post (below) in which I said I would start InNo once I had settled in to a job, and after having yet another job interview

(tally:

Interviews = 5
Second Interviews = 2
Rejections = 3
Offers = 0),

it occurred to me that I'm hanging absolutely everything on my getting a job. Contingent much? This is bad because it lays waaaaay too much pressure on getting the job.

(tally of things contingent upon getting a job:

1. finding an apartment
2. buying a car
3. getting health insurance ->
4. expensive health measures I shall take once I have health insurance which I shan't specifiy here
5. getting my kitty back (he can't live with me here 'cause my roommate's allergic)

and now

6. writing a novel)

I think that's waaay too much, don't you?

And sooo, in the interests of not putting my entire life off until I have that elusive job, I'm going to:

1. start at least looking into getting a car (yes, Ernest, I know I said I would weeks ago)
2. start InNoWriMo

That's right, you heard me, I'm going to start the new nobble, and I'm going to start it on

Sunday!

Which means that (time for another list):

1. my WriMo will be from Sunday Nov. 19, to Tuesday Dec. 19, which is thirty-one days, but I'm planning on taking Thanksgiving off.
2. I will aim at 3000 words/day and accept 2000, for a grand total of 60,000 -- 90,000. Is this unrealistic? We shall see.
3. I will not freak out, whatever happens. If I fall below my wordcount, I will not freak out. If the writing sucks, I will not freak out. I will stay the course, no matter how many soldiers die ... uh, I mean no matter how worthless the campaign-- er the nobble is. Wow, I know he's still alive, but I feel like I'm being haunted by the ghost of Rumsfeld. (Is he still alive? Was he ever?)

Sealed with spit and ... uh, pee, which I'm going to go take right now. Bye.

Innnnnteresting ...

Yeah. Um ...

Checking my web stats, I found that someone linked to my Why are interracial relationships important to society? post from this webpage (WARNING! NOT SAFE FOR WORK! DO NOT CLICK IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED!

It's a large, large life.

Writer's Block

Ever' body's askin' me if I have writer's block re: the nobble, and I didn't think I did. I thought I had a massive case of avoidance, which I didn't think was the same thing. But then I read this thing in the New York Times which said:

depression, which ''afflicts writers at a rate 8 to 10 times higher than the general population.''

(yoikes!) and:

'both very low and very high levels of arousal interfere with performance.'' In other words, too much motivation, as well as too little, can trigger writer's block, and this explains why ''the bigger the project, the bigger the block.''

hmmm ... and:

A friend of mine once invented a ''cure'' for minor blocks ... : to counteract a procrastination, create a bigger one. Think up a grand, long-term, world-changing project -- something like Mr. Casaubon's ''Key to All Mythologies'' from ''Middlemarch,'' or that old reliable, the Great American Novel -- and in your mind invest it with such life-defining importance that everything you do that doesn't contribute to realizing it becomes a waste of time. As long as meeting this week's deadline is a way of avoiding the really big thing that you ought to be doing instead, it becomes much easier. A pretty feeble ruse, perhaps, but it works.

which might work except the nobble is pretty damned big ... that's the problems; and then there's writing as avoidance of writing (kinda like this post!):

In ''Out of Sheer Rage'' Dyer achieves a Cartesian state of procrastination, leading his readers through so many densely nested layers of avoidance as he travels the world visiting Lawrence's haunts that not writing about Lawrence becomes an end in itself.

Okay, maybe I am blocked.

Things Goin' On In My Empty Head

Still fighting a cold (a cold! I haven't had one of those in years!) and my head is emptier than usual.

But yes, I am always this obsessed with television drama, especially when it's good. Why are we getting so many good television dramas these days? Could it be because our leaders are so shockingly horrible that we can't really watch what they're doing or we'll gouge out our own eyes? We've gotten used to torture and kidnapping and not habeusing corpuses and all sorts of anti-social-programs and anti-education hijinks ... but a pedophile heading up the anti-pedophile caucus in the Senate? Wow.

No wonder people are shooting up the Amish. The world is crazy.

Looking For A Job

Okay, it was inevitable. I'm now officially on the job market. Here's what I'm looking for and if you hear of anything in the Bay Area that might fit, please let me know!

Nonprofit: I'm particularly interested in nonprofits that address economic disadvantage, labor issues, immigration issues, and the environment. I have a lot of experience in arts and ethnic nonprofits.
• advocacy/organizing
• programming/program management
• event coordination
• development
• outreach/volunteer coordination/membership
• writing/editing/written project management
• teaching: writing/english/basic reading/all primary school subjects (esp. interested in teaching teens and adults)

For profit:
• writing/edition/written project management

I AM NOT LOOKING FOR ADMIN POSITIONS! And, except in the case of a development job, I'm not interested in entry-level positions.

Thanks all!

9/11/06

My friend C. woke me up around 6:30 or 7 that morning with a phone call.

"Oh my god!" she said. I've heard her upset before, but she prides herself on her crisis coping skills. I'd never heard her on the edge of hysteria like this.

"Oh my god, someone just flew a plane into the World Trade Center and it collapsed! They've also attacked the Pentagon and they're not sure about the White House! It's all over tv, but don't watch it! You shouldn't watch it!"

My first response to this was annoyance: "What are you talking about? Of course I'm going to watch it."

I didn't really believe her. I just thought, insofar as I could think before coffee, that she was responding to first reports, which are always inflated and, well, hysterical. I spent the rest of the day in my jammies on my couch, except when I got up to get food, and when I accosted my roommate in the hallway, myself by that time somewhat wild-eyed, with an injunction not to go to her office, which was across the street from the TransAm building in downtown San Francisco. (Most major cities were going through their moment of hubris, thinking they were important enough to be attacked by terrorists. SFans got over ours within 48 hours, although the city of SF and Homeland Security continue to be hysterical about the Bay Bridge.)

It was a strange day. My roommate had a tv in her own room so we sat, separate, watching the same show over and over again---the towers collapsing, the tiny plane disappearing into the side of the pentagon, the clouds of dust and ash shooting out sideways and through the canyons of New York. Just like I did with my roommate, so I did with my family and friends: we sat separated, each in our own individual or coupled units, watching the same show replicated on millions of small screens, repeated dozens of times over the course of the day.

It was a national sick day. So many of us, especially on the west coast, where the news reached us before we dressed for work, sat in our pajamas all day on the couch, eating comfort food and staving off that indoors-too-long headache. Staving off that feeling of unreality and monstrousness you get as a child when, through an emergency of the body, the order of the day is disturbed and you are thrown out of your routine. Somewhere, the world was continuing, having lunch, going to fifth period study hall, and you were home watching "Get Smart" reruns. Though you would never admit it to anyone, deep down, you hated such days. Such days in childhood were worse, in their way, than those long dark nights are now, those nights when you realize something about yourself and, no matter how many DVDs you slide into the player, you can't look away from that realization and there's nothing you can do but sit in a buzzingly empty room and study it, study yourself, your lacks. It was a headache day, and everyone spent it alone.

And no amount of hindsight can change the fact that we all knew, we all felt on the day, as we sat there watching the towers fall down, that something big had happened, something more horrifying than jet-fuel bombs, than people jumping out of 80th story windows, than flight attendants with throats cut by box cutters. The pundits will have it that we sold our rights out of fear of further terrorist attacks, but that's simply not true. We sat home all day, all year, suspecting that school was out forever. We sold our rights so that Mommy would come home, feel our foreheads, and tell us that we were going back to school tomorrow, no ifs, ands, or buts.

Why do you think the first chicken-soup tagline was "America, open for business?"

The problem is ... well, no, there's more than one problem. The first problem is that, once you've seen a horrifying truth, you can't unsee it. The second problem is that the truth we saw five years ago today was vast, complex, and vague. In fact, that's exactly what was so horrifying about it: that it wasn't a truth that can be contained in a few weighty sentences, but rather that it is the sort of truth that demands that you go out and find it and shape it. It's a horrible-monster-truth that is so big that you have to walk towards its multiple, fanged, snapping maws just to see to the edge of it. Another problem is that it's a truth too large to encompass that demands heroic action. But what heroic action? Against what? Who is the enemy? What is the transgression that must be righted? Do I need a sword? A pen? A ploughshare?

You can try to get big and general, but once you get big and general enough to encompass it, it loses all meaning. "America's arrogance" doesn't mean any more than "oil imperialism" or "the wages of capitalism". I suppose the only real thing to do is to break it down into its component tentacles and pick one to hack away at. Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" is really the first 9/11 emollient on offer. Because, to make the unreality go away, it has to be big, and it has to be real enough. Pick one: the Bush regime, neoconservatism, global warming, stop the addiction, religious racism, geographical ignorance, cultural ignorance, etc.

It would be nice if we, as a nation---just as we did on 9/11/01 when we all sat alone together and saw a big ugly truth---could as a nation all look up and realize that action and empowerment are the cures of inaction and disempowerment. It would be nice if we each picked a tentacle of 9/11 to hack away at, all the while seeing and recognizing the amorphous shape of the larger beast. I don't think it's going to happen, not enough to turn this around. It's impossible not to suspect that George W. Bush will be the American republic's Julius Caesar (without the intellect or the military prowess, natch.) Maybe that means that we have another century or so of open empire, under a dictatorship. But looking at China, looking at the EU ... I don't think that's going to happen, either. The problem with Julius Caesar comparisons is that you need the intellect and military prowess to have that kind of unquestionable power. We're a sad sloppy second, at best.

Maybe today is simply the anniversary of the death of our republic, a sadly misshapen creature, even in its youth and strength, and now something dying of terminal obsolescence. Republics are small things, and we are too big. Maybe that's the heart of the Big, Ugly Truth. I don't know, I still don't know. But I'm observing something today. And maybe it's just appropriate that I don't know what.

Bad News and Good News

Well, admissions are in order. Somehow, someway, the nobble has gone stale on me. I don't know exactly why, but since April, since I've been here at my parents' house, I have been unable to work on the damn thing.

This doesn't mean "writer's block", whatever that is (and I hate it when people ask me if I have writer's block. I'm sure they don't know what that's even supposed to mean!) I know what needs to be done on the book and I still have plenty of ideas. I just have no joy in the project right now. I didn't want to put it away and take the risk that it will simply never come back out again, but I think that's what I have to do now.

In Good News, the YA fantasy trilogy idea that's been floating around my head all year without landing because it was all abstractions and no images, finally threw out an image (and boy, was it a doozy!) yesterday, and I wrote the first two or three pages (longhand!)

I'm excited about it and I can't wait to get going on it. I even have a title for the first one: "The Sixth Element", which is boring, I know, but very fitting. I was thinking of de-boring-ing it by making it "The Sixth Source" but that's hard to pronounce and hardly less boring. But I like the second book title (so far) a lot better: "The Tendency of Magic is Toward Balance" or maybe just "The Tendency of Magic".

So, poor Chinaman Treetops needs to go away for awhile. Let's all hope it comes back. Sigh.

More Temporizing

I know, I know, I promised to blog again, but my self-imposed deadline for draft 2 iz coming up and I'm nowhere near close to finished. So I'm going to go crazy these next two weeks (ten days, actually) and see how much I can get done. Thereafter will come the bad writing fads. Promise.

Ignorance Ignorance

So much of my first draft was just placeholders. "Here, in this spot, something like this happens." I've got crap like that everywhere. I've spent the summer, so far, on the first five of what is now 17 chapters, rewriting and rewriting and rewriting that, because I can't rewrite the later chapters until I understand the earlier chapters.

For example, Leonard, my most verbose speaker (and the newcomer to the Martian colony, so he gets to lay out the whole world) is gay and not happy about it. You'd think this would be fairly straightforward---or at least I thought this would be fairly straightforward. But everything about his gay life and loves came out false-seeming in the rough. So I've been doing a lot of reading and discovering mainly how little I actually know about gay life and community now, not to mention a hundred years ago.

I have no "instincts" about a community that's closed to me. I've been bugging my queer friends and reading reading reading. I am so ignorant. I seem to get more ignorant the more I know. Leonard's central scene (literally central in the nobble, and the scene around which his earlier and later actions hinge) is completely opaque to me. What would happen here? Why would it happen? How would it play out? What would motivate these men and how would Leo respond to all of this? I know what needs to happen in this scene for the plot to move forward but I have no idea how it's going to work.

And here I was thinking that the rough draft was such an achievement.

And when this whole gay thing is all done, I'm going to have to tackle the woman thing and the immigrant thing. At least I have an in to both of those, but who knows? That might be more of a handicap and not less.

argh