Tag: Friday Philosophy

I had an alternate title:  Frienemies with Aging.  This could be part two of a very slow-moving series:  On Aging was published March 7, 2008.

When we got home from teaching last night, and with Debbie not having to teach at City Tech this morning because classes were canceled for Rosh Hashanah, I decided to use the fact that we had no classes this morning to do something to make the place slightly more livable.

Like assemble the cat tree we had purchased online and that arrived via UPS on Wednesday.  Photos of the finished project will be interspersed among this story of pain and fatigue and just growing old.  Now I didn’t have the camera with me last night when I was stuck on the floor, so I went the extra mile for verisimilitude and got back down on the floor in order to show the view from there and during the struggle to rise up against my oppressor:  gravity.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.  But when life gives you pickles, you’re screwed, because nobody likes pickleade.

The last few days have seemed to become days of reflection, at least for me.  From the appearance of the recent diary list periodically today, I was not alone.  But I don’t want to reflect on 9/11.  That has never been the way I have operated.

Meanwhile I have to eulogize my colleague who died last May at a memorial service on Tuesday.  That may seem to you to be an extremely long interim period between dying and memorial, but that’s the way stuff happens in a college.  She died between Finals Week and graduation.

Someone sent me an item last week about a transitioning transwoman (video at the link), a high school mathematics teacher in West Linn, OR.  On the face of it, this wasn’t a huge story, but it struck me as a huge coincidence.

Currently I have hardly slept for two days because every time I lay down, I have to cough.  The moving that is finally over apparently left my body in a run down state and I caught something on the first day of classes on Wednesday.  So I apologize if my current delirium causes any disjointedness.

Think of it as stream of unconsciousness.

We’ve been barely keeping our heads above water with the move, so I hadn’t had much time to think about what to write.

Teddy’s death hit us hard.  There’s a new school year starting…one which I would really prefer not to deal with.  A couple of avant-garde ideas almost breathed air.

But nope.  I really had not much.

In cases such as this in the past I have either written about why I was struggling to find something to write about (but that is transparent:  it’s the moving) or checked the news to see what I could find.

The news proved to be quite sad, for the most part.

There are so many ills tainting our world.  People’s inhumanity towards one another expresses itself in so many different ways.

Pick one.  Work on it.  Make it your Cause.  Commit the rest of your life to it.  Commit to bring it to an end.  Do anything you can to advance that issue, including working on other issues…so that maybe when the time comes someone might have learned enough about you and your issues that they might actually care about them as well as their own.

What?  What was that last part?  Work on other people’s issues?  Why would anyone ever do that?  Isn’t that, like, a colossal waste of time and effort?

Actually, no.  It’s how something…anything…gets accomplished.

Down here at the bottom of the issue food chain, the only way anyone is going to notice us is if we push other people forward, people who are and issues which are obscuring our existence.

So we’re still moving and certainly not in Pittsburgh with all the cool people.  Because of the moving, my brain is pretty much on the fritz as to anything momentous to write about.  There just hasn’t been enough continuous time to sit down and piece something together about the things I’d like to write about…even if I could really delineate what those items might be.

So let’s go to the news and see what we can find.

I haven’t seen any mention of this item here:  Radcliffe supports gay group with ‘generous’ donation.  Yes, the Harry Potter star is anti-homophobia and believes in the work being done by the The Trevor Project to combat teen suicide.

Fifteen years ago today I entered Theda Clark Memorial Hospital in Neenah, WI.  I had a procedure scheduled for August 9, to be performed by Dr. Eugene Schrang, who has since retired.  A couple of years ago, I wrote about it here and here and wrote about the month before that here.

Like all other surgeons with his specialty, he required payment up front.  Even though I had what was supposed to be complete medical insurance, there was no aid in raising the necessary funds from that direction.  In fact, if AT&T hadn’t pre-approved a Universal Card for me a few months before my surgery, I might still be wondering where the money might come from.  I guess they call it plastic surgery for a reason.

By the way, AT&T still owns a portion of my soul.

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.

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.