Category: Philosophy

This is #4 of my little Mini Series on Weekend Anthroplogy. Here’s the link to last week’s edition..

My opening prayer tonight… I got it into my head to find a nice version of Simple Gifts in the toobs. There’s quite a few that are either churchy or Coplandy and just not hitting the mark for me. Then I discovered this. Exquisite.

I looked for a tale from Burma (Myanmar), as I was thinking of this news:

The court has postponed issuing a verdict in the trial of Burma’s democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. It was scheduled to be announced Friday, but her lawyer says the court instead declared an unspecified “legal problem” had to first be decided … The court unexpectedly postponed the verdict until August 11. more about that here

In a life not dominated by the desire to change the world so that it would be a better place to live, moving would be a great excuse for taking a month away news and politics and trying to spread the word.

But my life is dominated by that mission.  

So I flipped a coin to see whether I should try to wrap some new words around an idea or two or post something old.  When one gets to be as old as I am, it gets more difficult to “write something new” since one may find that almost everything has already been addressed in the past couple of decades…or the 292 diaries posted here…or the 260 poems written.  As much as I would like for people to read my old diaries, in the spirit of learning about lives they cannot conceive, I know that the past gets forgotten very easily and reading someone’s old diaries is an unlikely occurrence.

Unfortunately for me, since it meant no nap this afternoon, on the last day before the moving begins, “something new” won.

Small weights, individually not much, bound to my joints, dragging me down, generating immobility, accumulating.

Sometimes I want to turn away.  Sometimes it is not that I desire to do so, but that I feel that I must, if only for my own sanity.  But there are times when even so, I must push onward, searching for glimmers of progress, of hope, of the remnants of dreams.

Last spring I volunteered to teach one section of students how to use the computer with college-level proficiency.  These students were brought here under the auspices of the Educational Opportunity Fund.

Sometimes I should try to remember that no good deed goes unpunished.

Just a little… The past few days, it seems there’s been a bit of lunacy going around.

I don’t have the energy for much. It’s been kinda noisy around my house lately, and I don’t mean the YELLING LOUDER variety.

“Weekend Anthropology” … I started last Saturday with one, so I thought I’d try another. This is much abbreviated than before though.

“There seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn’t forbidden.”

R. Heinlein, The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress

Here it comes again.

At a time when the country of Pakistan, not what anyone generally conceives of as a bastion of progressive attitude on GLBT rights…Pakistan for %^&$%^’s sake…can have its Supreme Court rule that transfolk should be able to enjoy the same rights under the law as do the so-called normal people, there is a struggle in this country to even admit we are human beings, deserving of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Or, failing those, at least the use of a bathroom.

Since we had to go house hunting Friday afternoon, I decided to put together a summary of some trans news items for Friday evening’s column.  But while I was doing so, one of my favorite movies came on, namely Carl Sagan’s Contact.

The news, of course, is what it is.  The movie put a different spin on the whole thing,  so maybe this will come out as not only commentary on those items but also a statement about the state of the universe.

Just maybe a few readers out there will get the point of what I am trying to say.  There is always hope for that.

It’s been a long hard work, trying to get back into the swing of teaching.  The course we are teaching only lasts for 5 weeks and is at a very low, introductory level (Computer Literacy), but that is where these students are.  The program is part of the New Jersey Equal Opportunity Fund, an attempt to rescue students who had fewer opportunities for advancement during their time in high school.  Most are from the inner city areas of Jersey.

Last weekend Debbie and I decided to march in the New York Pride Parade for the first time since we moved to the area in 2000.  We are, generally speaking, not designed for marching.  I marched in both the Dyke March and the Pride Parade in Seattle and in the San Francisco Pride Parade once upon a time, but that was back in the 90s.  I was so much younger then;  I’m older than that now.  Debbie is from Los Angeles originally, but never marched there.

Anyway, we gave it a shot this year in The City.  We didn’t make it all the way.  Having to stand in the heat and wait for 3 hours before we could start marching took most of the starch out of us.

But I took plenty of pictures.  The point of these words is to provide some wrapping for those pictures.

(Crossposted from The Wild Wild Left

(a natural follow up to my future shock essay)

I remember a line from a book or movie, having no recollection of the source material itself, where someone asked this genius what he thought about most of the day. They were sitting outside, and the genius had this far off look of wonder on his face, staring out into the world. He answered his curious friend, who was sitting there, palpably concentrating, trying to “figure out” the workings of his mind,”Colors, mostly.”

“Colors?”

“Yeah, I like all the greens a lot.”

I really liked that line a lot. I loved the bafflement of the listner, who was so busy trying to figure out the answers to everything, he totally forgot how to live in “time.”

To be fully aware, you have to live in the now, the scents, the colors, the sounds, the tastes, right in your skin, and appreciate the full wonder of the moments that pass before you.

I’m acutely aware of time, I live in time more than space. History is cool and all, but the greatest of philosophies happened because the people living them wrote to their times unheeding of those before them, and only paying minor attention to the future.  

They’re here.

After…how long is that?  Forever?  Really?…the Congress has a couple of bills before it which would actually be beneficial to the GLBT community.  And…horror of horrors…to transfolk as well.

What’s up with that?

The two bills go by the unofficial names of the Matthew Shepard Act and ENDA.  They cover two of the parts of what I have in the past considered the heart of The Gay Agenda:

• the right to not be fired for being GLBT
• the right to not be thrown out of our residences if discovered to be GLBT
• the right to be served in a restaurant
• the right not to be beaten up every other Tuesday

I am aware that other people think that marriage equality and the right to serve in the military are also at the heart of said agenda.  I’m of the feeling that maybe they are more of the lungs.  What I listed in the box affect all GLBT people, including those who are not in relationships or who have no interest in the military (including those who, like myself, who have already served, thank you).

Sometimes there are bad weeks, weeks in which the steps backward, away from cohesion and community formation…and the dream of inclusion…are so extremely painful.  This has been one of them.

Yes, there has been negative news (and a few positive notes, to be sure), for GLBT people.  But at least for me, nothing has torn at my heart as much as the divisiveness which has resulted from this community’s reaction to that news.

I’d hope that people could understand where each other are coming from as we try to keep the lines of communication open.  The intention of this piece is to try to generate some of that understanding.

For all I know, however, I may fail big time, and if I do, the pain will surely intensify.