One Red Hot Country Mama!

We just finished our (pretend) Christmas (we don’t celebrate, but we get a tree and do stuff with family), and we have been settling in to the new apartment. Basically, we live a 20-second walk away from lake Ontario, in an area of Toronto called “The Beach”. It is really beautiful here, and we have been going on walks every day, sometimes twice!

Last night we went on a walk together, to see the lake steaming and the snow steaming. It was about 10 degrees celcius out, and it was beautiful. It looked all mysterious and full of magic. We looked up and saw a full starry sky – much more brilliant than the usual for the city. We were out with our camera, and saw a few other couples doing the same, but mostly it was deserted.

I wondered – where the heck are all the people? This beauty should not be part of a secret night. People should be out enjoying it too. Yeah, I realize that this sounds no fun and good for you, but it is just such a loss. I remember around the time Nintendo came out, the first really fun game console (I think those who have played Atari and Intellivision agree that it was not nearly as fun) – that was when the kids on my street stopped playing outside.

Have the rest of us done the same? Are we not playing outside anymore? Are we too busy with our glowing screens to see the world outside? I hope not!

I first read this quote about Ashley Judd, believe it or not, and I think there is a lot of truth to it. I don’t really know about her career or about her as a person, but I can imagine that as a star with addiction problems, she must have more than her share of public critisism.

I have been a little off lately, and I think that the thing that has upset the applecart, is the fact that I feel like people are misjudging me. Especially nice people who I like. I am on opposite sides to them, and I can’t do anything to change it. In truth, even for people that I DON’T like that much, I still get frustrated that they misjudge or even hate me. But – what can you do? People will be who they want to be, and it is not up to me to correct some sort of cosmic injustice.

It is especially hard when I don’t deserve it. It bothers me. But, so many things in the world don’t make sense anyway. So many things are unfair – slavery, war, inequality based on race or gender. Why would my life be the one safe harbor that was not that way? If people hate me, they can go ahead, have fun. There is nothing that I can do to change their minds anyway. I guess the only thing that I can do is live my own best life, be as kind and helpful as possible and take it from there. What people think of me is their own business, and they can keep it that way.

It has been a wonderful but stressful time lately. I was sitting down to write down my personal goals the other day, and I got stumped. I realized that many of my goals had been attained and put down my pen. As I sit here with my purring cat on my lap, with the man that I love asleep in the next room, and getting e-mail notices from the business that I built, living in an area that I love with a beautiful Christmas tree beside me, I can’t believe it. If someone told me this would be my life a year ago, I would have said “if I have all of those things, there will be nothing to be upset about. I would be nothing but thankful”.

But it isn’t working out that way.

Lately, I feel as though we are under siege from every angle – personal, family, business etc. This is not just me seeing it this way, it just happens that there is a lot of tension around, not necessarily being directed at me, but affecting me greatly.

It is as though I am in a little car, and the other drivers are dangerous – some are drunk, some are chatting on the cell phone, too busy with their own world to see there is a dangerous world of speed and metal out there and some don’t really know how to drive yet. The cars keep slamming into me, and I try to keep a cheerful disposition, focus on my own car getting to safety and not take it personally. But how can I? I am not safe. And as a result, my driving starts to suck. I start to swerve and weave and dent other innocent drivers too.

So – what am I supposed to do? Part of me just wants to put the music on loud and ignore them all. Part of me wants to fight everyone. To be like some sort of police officer arresting all of the bad guys. Another part of me just wants to get off the road altogether, sell my car and start biking everywhere – the roads are too dangerous.

Some spiritual gurus may say that the reason why I am unhappy, is that I am spending too much time trying to protect what I have, rather then appreciating it and being in the moment with it. But, when I get in the moment of it, and am honest with my feelings, all I can feel is “this sucks”! So maybe the key is to be honest about the fact that it sucks, and move on. Appreciate what I have, and who I love and be done with it. The roads are dangerous out there. Hopefully things will get better when the sun goes up, and it stops raining.

I just finished the book Exile and Pride by Eli Clare. I know that when I finish a book in a weekend that it is good. I forget the reading too much makes me tired sometimes. That I need to have “breaks” as though I am working or at the gym. When I can’t stop reading, that is the best.

The book description is the following:

Exile and Pride explores the landscape of disability, class, queerness, and child abuse, telling stories which echo with the sounds of an Oregon logging and fishing town and with the lively political debates of crip crusadors and transgender warriors.

Clare, who has Cerebral Palsy, is a lesbian, was abused as a child and comes from a working-class rural background, has a unique on many things. For example, from an environmental point of view, she can see things from both the leftist-urban point of view as being educated with an arts degree in the city, but also from the loggers point of view from her rural roots. In one of her many essays on clear-cutting, she talks about how environmentalists going after loggers is like pitting sister against brother, and suggests looking at the root cause (our consumption and market forces) at the core of the issue instead.

Also, as both being a gay transgender and disabled at the same time, she has a unique view of what it means to be singled out by society, and cleverly compares the slang “queer” to the slang of “crip” (for cripple) or freak. In a very pragmatic way, she discusses how some groups can take ownership of certain words, but some can’t.

She discusses about the medicalization of disability, and compares the pity associated with the sickness model compared to the freak show, where people would flaunt their disabilities, and be stared at, but at least they would be able to make a living.

I guess statistically, it had to happen that someone would eventually have the combination of experiences that Clare has had. It just seems like just one or two of them is enough to write a book about – and in the end, you feel pretty amazed by what she did. I kept asking myself – what is most important in who she is: herself as an individual, her disability, being transgender, being a survivor of child abuse?

A couple of years ago, I would have said individual, because that is what gave her the drive to achieve what she has. But now I think that everything has an effect. Let’s face it – able bodied and disabled people live different experiences on earth. So do straight and gay. So do beautiful and not beautiful. So do rich and poor. So let’s stop pretending that we are all created equal, because we aren’t.