Tech

Fixed!

After looking up various troubleshooting tips, I decided just to look at installing RAM in case there was an issue with that I overlooked. Sure enough, matched pairs have to be installed in banks going from the center outwards. One of those things that is logical to a computer and not to me. How should I know that’s how it likes to access it’s memory.

One funny thing which did happen through all this is that my computer suddenly decided it was December 1969, and when I tried to sign into Google it said it was using an encrypted certificate that wouldn’t be available until 2006. 1969? My computer is having some kind of flashback.

I wonder what computers did during the summer of love?

Tech

It is Clear I have A Co-dependent Relationship With My G5

I have a love hate relationship with my Power Mac G5. I got it a few years ago, it was my first major computer (I think imacs are a titch frivilous). I mostly picked it because then I could edit video on it, and burn DVD’s, and just generally use programs that made my imac run away squealing in terror. For the most part it’s a decent workhorse, very few problems, ever. I’ve had friends with PC’s who end up having to take them in and get them fixed over and over and over while I’ve only needed to call Apple support maybe once.

That doesn’t mean my computer is perfect though. I was trained to be a video technician, and I do know a lot of Mac troubleshooting. I think anyone with a computer should learn to troubleshoot it, but my point is my computer does act up from time to time and normally I can fix it, even if it takes me a few hours. And this is one of those times.

I’m trying to install a gig of memory because as I mentioned above, I need to be able to edit on my computer, and I have a piddly amount of memory (215mb or some such nonsense). So yeah, I ordered new RAM, and it came as a single when I need a matched pair. I should have just put it back in the box, but no, I tried to install it, the machine went “Meh!” I uninstalled it, the machine still went “Meh!” I fiddled with my original RAM for about two hours, trying different combinations, seeing if I missed something, nothing nothing nothing would happen.

This time when my Mac went “Meh!” it would turn on, you could hear the fan and the hum of the hard drive starting, then quiet except for the fan, and the power light would just blink at me. Blink. Blink. ARG! I looked everywhere for a translation of the flashes (yes, how it flashes means something). I finally found it today but even then it doesn’t adequately explain my particular flashing problem.

Besides fiddling with RAM, I zapped the PRAM, I did a Safe Boot, and I even reset the PMU (a teeny tiny button way in the deepest bowels of my tower). NOTHING!! Just that goddamn BLINKING! I’m wondering if I fucked up the original RAM, because I did have to pull it out and put it back a number of times. I can’t imagine anything that fiddly would enjoy being bullied around. Luckily I sent back the useless RAM and ordered some new RAM that is in a matched pair, so I’m hoping that when it gets here tomorrow and I install it, it will make the Machine happy and we won’t have these interpersonal difficulties anymore!!

I think most of us can honestly say we have co-dependent relationships with our computers. I forgive it for so many really unforgivable things, and it doesn’t ever apologize for it’s misbehavior. “Five pages you say? I never saw five pages around here, you must have been dreaming that you spent all night typing up that application. Oh, I don’t like running this program, I think I’ll stop. No, you can’t shut off the program, I just don’t like it, screw off, I’m not going to let it respond to you. Force Quit? Ha ha, oh, and by the way, now I won’t turn off either so you can just FUCK OFF! Oh, you’re pulling the plug, oh aren’t you wiley? Well now I really hate you, I’m going to be crabby when you turn me back on. Oops, I forgot you have permission to install software. Hey! Look at this, I can make a swirly circle, oooh! Wait, let’s watch it for the next ten minutes, I really like the swirly circle. I know you put this thing in the trash, but I’m not going to throw it out. Eeeeh, you know how I feel about Peer to Peer file sharing, I don’t think you should use this program, think of Metallica!! How will they feed their children if you don’t pay for Enter Sandman! Oh, you don’t like Metallica? Oh sure, that singer has been dead for fifty years, but I think you should still order that rare album in from overseas instead of downloading it. . .”

And on and on, ad nauseum.

Sometimes I call it a useless motherfucker. And then I immediately apologize and plead for it to work. And then I feel sad and betrayed.

See, how can I have a real relationship when I already have this dysfunctional thing going on with my Power Mac?

Filmmaking, Politics, Pop Culture, Race

More “Fuck You” to Mel Gibson’s rampant racism

I got this in my email from the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, and I thought I would post it here. I read another really good article on Apocalypto from a Mayan Scholar, but I don’t remember where it is. If I find it I’ll link it.

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(This first commentary is written by Prof. Gerardo Aldana of UCSB. He is a Maya specialist and a good Mexica brother. The second, below, is from Indian Country Today.)

Having viewed a screening of *Apocalypto *at UCSB on December 3rd, I walked away recognizing three main points within Mel Gibson’s movie. This first colors the entire story, seemingly as a kind of guiding moral: “the good Indian is the savage one in the forest.” There is absolutely nothing appealing about Maya city-life in this movie—no indication that Maya urban centers flourished in the region for hundreds of years. Instead, religious figures are depicted as fraudulent or heavily drugged; political figures are fat and passive (both of these characterizations having been lifted straight from *The Road to El Dorado*); and everyone else seems to be living a nightmare of hard labor, servitude, famine, and/or disease. The “Maya” living in the forest village, on the other hand, are fantasized animations of National Geographic
photos of Amazonian tribes. These “hidden” Indians provide the audience the only possibility for sympathy—and this perhaps restricted to puerile humor or one family’s role as (surprise!) the underdog. For Gibson, it appears, the “noble savage” remains a valid ideal.

Second, for having a completely clean slate upon which to write, the story is pathetically unoriginal. From his decidedly Western constructions of masculinity, gender, and sexuality, to the use of a baseball move in a critical hand-to-hand combat scene, to lifting an escape scene from Harrison Ford’s character in *The Fugitive*, one gets the sense that all of his creative energy was invested in discovering ways to depict (previously) unimaginable gore. In fact, I would be ready to write off the entire movie as nothing more than a continuation of Gibson’s hyper-violent mental masturbation, except for the real-world implications.

This leads me to the third point, and the real crime, which is Gibson’s interpretive shift in his representation of horrific behaviors. Specifically, four of five
viscerally repugnant cultural practices that are here attributed to Maya culture are actually “borrowed” from the West. The raid on the protagonist’s village constitutes the first interpretive shift viewed by the audience.

The brutality and method of this raid directly replicate the documented activities of
representatives of the British Rubber Company in the Amazon Basin during the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the Amazon case, those perpetuating
the human rights violations were European or European-descendents against indigenous
communities; the raiding of villages for human sacrifice is undocumented for Maya cultures.

Next, the slave market depicted in the city constitutes a mirror image of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the pre-Civil War United States. In that case, the “sellers” of African slaves were Europeans or European-Americans, dehumanizing Other peoples by treating them as commodities. While slavery is documented for Maya cultures (and Greek, and Roman, etc.), there is nothing that attests to their having been bought and/or sold in public market contexts.

A third objectionable attribution is that of decapitated human heads placed on stakes within the city center. Documented examples of this practice come from Cortes’s entrada into Central Mexico committed by Spanish conquistadors against their
indigenous “enemies.”

Depictions of “skull racks” do exist, but there is no evidence that these
resulted from mass murder or even that they still had flesh on them when they were hung. Finally, the escape portal for the protagonist—the releasing of captives to run toward freedom while being shot at—is straight from ancient Rome (or at least Hollywood’s depictions of Roman coliseum “sports”) and finds no corroboration in records concerning Maya peoples.

Heart sacrifice is the only practice that scholars have “read” from ancient Maya cultural remains—although the scale and performance is Gibson’s fantasy alone.
The attribution of heart sacrifice to the Maya is largely anchored to Spanish accounts of Aztec practices, which raises two additional issues: *i) *Mathew Restall’s recent *Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest *gives a good overview of how unreliable Spanish accounts may be; and *ii) *Mel Gibson clearly could not have substituted the Aztec capital for his “Maya” city given the same Spanish accounts of it (e.g. Bernal Diaz del Castillo on approaching Tenochtitlan: “With such wonderful
sights to gaze on we did not know what to say, or if this was real that we saw before our eyes. On the land side there were great cities, and on the lake many more…”)

In any event, these perversions of the historical record appear to be Gibson’s alone and cause me to wonder if they reflect an agenda. Whether he meant to claim that
all cultures have been as grotesquely violent or inhumane as the West (and so in some
twisted way, making such behavior “ok”), or if there is a more nefarious attempt at disparaging Mesoamerican cultures in some sort of justification of their “conquest” (implied by the pristine representation of the Spaniards)—this is a question Gibson alone can answer.

Whatever his response, my assessment is that—apart from its “artistic” license—because it takes the worst of the West and “reads” it into one or two days of
“Maya” civilization, this movie comprises an extreme disservice to Maya (and Mesoamerican)cultures past and present, and to indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere. The case is so extreme, I wonder if it might constitute a legally actionable hate crime against Maya people. At the very least, though,with this movie, Gibson has performed a tremendous disservice to scholars who aim at accurate
representations of the past, and to the audiences who will have their perspectives of Maya culture tainted by the agenda of one man with too much money.

Prof. Gerardo Aldana y V

University of California, Santa Barbara

gvaldana@chicst.ucsb.edu

*
*

*Dowell: ‘Apocalypto’ is upon us*
(c)
Indian Country Today December 08, 2006. *All Rights Reserved* Mel
Gibson’s
”Apocalypto,” a movie about human sacrifice among the ancient Maya, premiered Dec. 1 at Chickasaw Nation’s Riverwind Casino amidst Hollywood-style hoopla. Oklahoma Indian actors have been wooed by director Mel Gibson and are about to make a big splash on the big screen with the potential for even bigger and better roles for Natives in film. I understand Gibson’s claim that the movie is about a society’s
excesses and the costs of war (the movie has been billed as an anti-war film). I can
stand with him on those aspects. But what message is ”Apocalypto” really sending about the Native peoples of Mexico and Central America? This is but one thing we Indian people in the North must consider and question before we jump on Gibson’s bandwagon.

I have been to Central America. I have visited the Maya in their homes where
I saw mountains of beautiful fruits and vegetables being grown, not for Mayan consumption, but for export, most likely to the United States. The Maya could not eat those fruits of their labor. They cannot afford to. In the village I visited, the Maya shared a communal kitchen where most days the women cooked meals of beans and tortillas because that is what the family’s hard labor in the fields afford them.

I heard the cries of women whose husbands had been ”disappeared” and murdered by government troops or by paramilitaries. In Guatemala they are struggling to recover after almost 40 years of civil war incited by the 1954 CIA overthrow of a democratic government, subsequently wiping from the face of the earth 140 Mayan villages. The Maya fled to bordering countries and some were held in death camps for removal, much like our own ancestors’ Trails of Tears. This is contemporary history.

The extreme, impoverished lives most Mayans live are not due to the ”excesses of their ancestors,” as stated in a recent ”20/20” special on ABC. It is due rather to the institutionalized racism of the church, military and government, which could not recognize our own Indian ancestors as human, justifying their wholesale slaughter, Christian conversion via boarding schools and the taking of our lands.

Before we rush to pat Gibson on the back we should understand that the same religious, government, military and corporate institutions that systematically conspired to take our lands and destroy our culture here in the North also had a hand in the demise of the ancient and contemporary Maya people. When the Spaniards invaded Central America in the 16th century, ancient Maya texts were burned so that the people would forget their history and a new history, more palatable to Europeans, could replace it.

Because my community work gives me the opportunity to occasionally network with indigenous peoples from below the U.S.-imposed border with Mexico, I am aware that some Maya people are not happy with this film. This pretty much answers the question why Gibson chose to hire North American Indians, making it necessary to teach them a Mayan language. If the film was welcomed by the Maya, he could have hired Maya people, since the film was made in their territories.

How will a film, which depicts the Maya as bloodthirsty primitives, impact their work, their lives, their image and our perception of them? What impacts will that portrayal have on the people in power who have an obligation to make policy for the Maya in Mexico or Guatemala, or elsewhere in Central America, where most policy is implemented at the business end of a gun?

Because we have a genetic, cultural and historical relationship with all the peoples of Turtle Island, we have an obligation to view this film with discerning eyes and a critical mind. The movie opened nationally on Dec. 8. We can use this as an opportunity for raising consciousness and educating about our commonalities with the indigenous peoples from below the border.

For instance, do you know that in some of those countries indigenous peoples
comprise 40 percent to 80 percent of the population? In the case of the Maya, a lot, if not most, speak Maya as their first language. The women still dress in the traditional huipil. In Chiapas, where the Maya communities are occupied by the Mexican government (with aid from the United States), a large part of the region’s resources are sucked out from under the Mayas’ feet to generate electrical power for the rest of the country while the Chiapas Maya live without running water or electricity.

We should remember that some of the brown people coming across the lower border as ”illegals” are probably Maya, or descendants of other Native nations. To justify atrocities against Native peoples (and to manipulate the citizenry into looking the other way), the elite have historically sought ways to portray us as less than human.

Let’s make this an opportunity to learn more about contemporary Mayan struggles as well as the current struggles of Indian communities throughout the Americas. They are among the thousands of indigenous peoples who are going to the international community to seek redress for their grievances.

As we watch this new movie, we are obligated to do so with an informed mind. Our history is the Mayan history.

*J.K. Dowell, Quapaw/Cherokee, is founder and director of the Eagle and
Condor Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance and lives in Tahlequah, Okla.*

Please visit the Indian Country Today
website for more articles related to
this topic.
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I’m always baffled when people are still surprised that Maya people still exist. I have a friend who’s Mayan and he saw his family murdered by a US sponsored totalitarian government. People like to think of Indigenous people as living way back in the past, out of sight, out of mind. Maybe Gibson was hoping he could be racist again by singling out a group he thought was extinct. By the way, there are also still Beothuks out there.

I’m also embarrassed that the lead role was played by a Cree actor. I know it’s really amazing to get a major role if you’re aboriginal, but still, it’s important to be ethical in your choices. I would say it’s amazing to be well paid for a film role and be aboriginal, but Mel was very proud of the fact that he could pay First Nations actors less than the going wage. Either way, ethics people. I’m reminded of when Gordon Tootoosis turned down that Jackie Chan movie because it was racist, another Aboriginal actor took it on and has been getting flak from the community ever since, and rightly so. Aboriginal actors should unite somehow in boycotting roles or films which promote racist attitudes towards our people, or anyone really. Let Mel Gibson direct a bunch of white folks in red face. Why should we be puppets to valorize colonization?

Aboriginals in the film industry get fucked over all the time. I know because I’m in there!! I could go off on the Industry’s treatment of brown people, but I won’t in this post. All I’ll say is it’s sad to hear an Aboriginal actor get excited because he finally has a role where he doesn’t have to ride a horse.

Race, Saskatoon

Five Bullets in an Indian’s Dog

I don’t know how much you all know about Saskatoon, but this city is one of the most racist environments I have ever lived in, even worse than Quebec!!! It’s nearly 50/50 between white and aboriginal, yet the majority of people employed are white. I have never seen any kind of employment parity in this town. I had a job that was trying to get employment parity, but I had to quit because a coworker was making racist comments towards me and the director didn’t think it was an issue.

And we’re screwed either way. If we’re broke and living in the inner city, whites call us drunk welfare bums. If we live in a moderately affluent neighborhood and dare to have a new car, well then we’re rich and getting that infamous free money from the government. After all, how dare an Aboriginal own a new car, or god forbid a house. White canadians seriously believe we each make 30 000 a year solely from free government money.

Do you know how much money we get for being aboriginal yearly? Five bucks. Literally, you line up in front of a table with Mounties in full regalia and they give you a nice new crisp five dollar bill. Treaty day, it is called, and usually that money gets used up at the dickie dee stand within about 15 minutes.

Racist shit goes down in Saskatoon all the time. In grade three I had one friend in my school, the only other aboriginal. Everyone else was white, and they all hated us. Racist comments throughout elementary school would be ignored by teachers. Aw man, it sucked!

You may have heard of Saskatoon in the news a while back when the police were busted for their Starlight Drives. Essentially they would pick up a drunk aboriginal man and instead of taking him to the drunk tank, they would take him out to the powerplant in mid winter, take his shoes and coat, and leave him out there to walk back. My friend and I drove out there recently, it has a creepy feeling, you can tell people were killed there. We clocked the distance from the drop off point to the nearest house or other shelter. It was about three kilometres, maybe three and a half. It was obviously meant to kill these people. There was a lot of protests, a lot of trials, internal investigations. Only two police were singled out, and the repercussions of killing people was a three month jail sentence and being fired from the police force. After all, they were only Indians.

A new story has come out in the last couple of days. A lot of differing accounts are going around, but basically, a police officer was hassling an aboriginal family looking for gangland ties (we do have a lot of gangs here, but that’s not the point). The families 17 year old german shepard was shot five times “in self defense.” The first article had the police saying that the dog had jumped the fence and attacked the officer, but today’s article had the boy who owned the dog showing that the only blood spatter was in the yard, which means the police were lying, again. The police here lie all the time. 6 cars and nine officers were on the scene immediately to deal with the aftermath. One family member stayed in the house and videotaped the confrontation between the family and the cops, and apparently got some very derogatory things the cops were saying on videotape. Of course now the police have been demanding the tape “for their investigation.” The family is not giving it up, thank god. The dog is at the veterinarian’s right now being treated, it seems to be stable but they’re trying to fix his ear that was shot off.

There isn’t an effective way to police the police, or the mounties. If they’re fucked up racists, then the only recourse we have is to demand they do an internal investigation. It’s much like letting Goebbels investigate Nazi atrocities, just a bad idea all around. In another lovely recent news story, a cop raped an aboriginal woman in custody. I didn’t pay much attention so I can’t give you the details, I think I was suffering racism overload and was trying to think happy thoughts somewhere.

Reporting a crime if you’re aboriginal is fucked too. Every aboriginal woman I know who has reported a rape and even knows the name and address of the attacker gets her charges dropped. A person close to me was even dismissed after the rapist said it was consensual sex. He was white, she was brown, case closed. This was one of the main reasons I never reported my rape or pressed charges, even though I knew the names and addresses of the assailants. Once I was beaten in the street and a cop car across the street just sat there, we didn’t get helped until some women stopped their car and ran out yelling at the perps. And then when we called the cops to come take our statement, they didn’t bother showing up because they wanted us to calm down first.

When I did make my statement some stuff was really telling. My friend who also got beat up was white. He asked her what school she went to (we were teenagers). He didn’t ask me what school I went to, he said, and I quote “So are you on welfare or what are you doing?”

I don’t know what will ever stop the Saskatoon Police force, or any police force really, from being openly, actively racist. They can have as many “sensitivity training” workshops as they want, but the fact is after learning not to use words like wagonburner or injun or chief, they’re still going to have a jolly good time killing, raping, assaulting, and denigrating aboriginals. And not only that, but they’ll shoot our damn dogs too.

Body Mods

Yes, It REALLY Does Hurt

I got tattooed today, it didn’t take long, only an hour and a half, and I love them! It’s funny, sitting down for a tattoo at first you think about how much it’s going to hurt and that it’s basically a commitment to a specific amount of pain for a specific amount of time. And then the stencil is on and the gun is going and as soon as it starts there’s no turning back, unless you’re willing to walk around with a line of a tattoo or a face or a little hand or whatever. My tattoo artist told me very few people quit a tattoo and never return. It’s true. My armbands were taking quite a few hours, probably five hours at least, no, more like six, and I had to keep coming back for sittings because I would just hit the pain threshold after two hours. Ugh. And hitting your threshold is kind of scary because unlike hardcore BDSM scenes, your tattoo artist isn’t going to wrap you in a blanket and cuddle you until you’re back on the ground.

So yes, pain. I think the fact that you do have to sit for a long time enduring pain is part of what makes tattoos so attractive. I read that people use local anesthetic sometimes. I think that’s wimp talk, but I’m a jerk about stuff like that. Even numbing ointment for piercings makes me laugh.

The most painful part of tattooing is doing the line work. Jesus Christ that hurts, it’s so painful and yet it’s the very first thing you experience, no warm ups dude. When I got the back of my neck tattooed, oh, I should mention the back of my neck is one of the MAJOR erogenous zones of my body, it’s totally like, if you want to seduce me all you have to do is touch me there, it’s ridiculous. Anyway, she was going away at the back of my neck doing the shading and she hit the happy spot of my neck. It really hurt but at the same time was totally tickly and fun. I wish all tattooing felt like that one little section.

Incidentally, having the back of my neck be so sensitive is part of the reason I have normally shaved the back of my head, it feels good!

The other thing about being tattooed is that every part of your body feels different being tattooed. Sometimes you can even feel the sensation change when you’re getting tattooed in a small spot. You might be totally fine and then a centimetre over it’s agony. You really never know.

People say dumb stuff about tattoos if they’ve never had one. For one thing, I’ve noticed it’s only non-tattooed people who regard others tattoos as frivilous. I mean, I’ll just be standing around and someone will point to my tattoos and try to make a really unfunny ignorant joke. I think there are some things they really don’t understand. First of all, it does really fucking hurt, and no one is going to put themselves through that much pain for a tat that has no relevance to them personally. Unless they’re stupid and regret it, but even then it’s mean to make fun of their tattoo. Most of the work I’ve seen out there means something to the person it’s on. All my tattoos mean something, but if you make fun of them then I refuse to explain the significance and watch someone trample that as well. Sometimes it’s funny to watch someone be an asshole and then be told point blank that the tattoo is a memorial to a loved one who passed away. I’m sure it feels awful to be the tattooed person explaining that, but it’s pretty effective at shaming some asshole.

The next really stupid thing people say is “What about when you’re eighty! Oh my god, your tattoo will be all smeared and wrinkly.” First off, that smeary bleeding effect in some tattoos you see are the result of bad tattooing. If it goes just a titch deeper and ends up in the layer of fat under your skin, you’ll see that happen because your fat cells will start happily carting off ink willy nilly. Secondly, ALL of me will be wrinkly, and the idea of my aging body 50 years from now is not going to dissuade me from expressing who I am on the outside of my body.

And finally, the worst part about being tattooed and being stone/having PTSD is when I’m standing around in public and a stranger grabs or feels one of my tattoos. Holy shit is that messed up. I shouldn’t even have to explain why that’s fucked, and by the way, touching a pregnant woman’s belly without permission is equally fucked.

I love my new ink. I would post pictures, but I have no digital camera. I might buy one with an artist fee that’s coming up around the corner, I really need one. I now have a black and blue nautical star on my left arm and a red and black nautical star on the other. And my biohazard symbol.

Feminism, Transgender, Transphobia

Gender, Privilege, and Complicity

There’s a massive blog discussion going on right now about transphobia in “radical feminism.” I’m having trouble keeping up with it, and I spend a huge amount of time online. I’m sure I’ll miss some points, but these are the ones I am thinking of right now.

First off, how can a movement committed to equality for both genders ignore the fact that there are other people being oppressed due to gender issues. In my logic, it would follow that feminism would align itself with trans liberation. I guess that’s not true. But as a feminist, and as a trans person, I see a very clear link between the two.

I think a further issue is the inability of certain people to acknowledge their own privilege, as Jack at Angry Brown Butch pointed out. I recently noticed this with a friend of mine when I realized she had no clue as to my lived experience compared to her own highly privileged lived experience. It’s probably hard for some people to extend themselves into understanding someone else and the intersecting oppressions which colour their lives, but at the same time I think it’s essential for personal growth to become empathetic and conscious of others. I’m lucky in that most people I’m close to are open enough to try expanding their understanding, but at the same time it’s frustrating to have to point it out.

Another point about the trans bashing on that thread was that the site owner failed miserably at moderating. Maybe it doesn’t seem (to some) that eliminating hateful comments from a post isn’t a priority, it’s the internet, la la la, the site owner wasn’t making the comments, etc. But take it into a real life situation. If the site owner was out having coffee with her faithful commenters and they saw a transwoman go into the bathroom and followed her to beat her up and then yell hateful invectives as she ran away, what responsibility does the site owner have if she wasn’t involved directly in the attack? You’re just as responsible for someone else’s oppression if you stand back as a spectator doing nothing. Pretty much all hate fuelled atrocities in the world have been enabled by people standing by and doing NOTHING. There is nothing that makes me feel more betrayed than having a close friend let someone get away with a racist/homophobic/transphobic/crazyphobic/fatphobic/etc. comment and then apologizing about it to me later. I can’t fight on my own all the time, and nobody should.

I did let someone get away with something really ignorant and stupid. I was having beers with two white women and a friend who’s a mix of Chinese and Japanese. We were having an okay conversation until the white women got excited about wanting my friend to teach them to make an Asian dish that was completely unrelated to her background, and which she didn’t know how to make either being born and raised in North America. She and I talked about it later, but I still felt like an ass for not calling those women out.

I also have trouble calling people out on their shit when they used the “Retarded” word. Okay, people, honestly SHUT THE FUCK UP!!! Retard is a fucked up word, and even though it perfectly describes my sister’s condition, I can’t use it because people attached so much goddamn bullshit to it. I don’t care if you think someone is severely developmentally delayed and disabled because they were an asshole or said something you don’t like. Do you even know what retarded means? And furthermore, have you ever clued into the fact that my sister who I love is severely retarded and that in effect using that word as a pejorative means you’re telling me her life is worth less than others?

So we all have a responsibility to stand up against hate and oppression even, especially, when it does not directly effect our lives. One thing which did make me feel good about this brouhaha was that a diverse group of people backed trans rights against a rabid group of phobes. And some really interesting discussions have been happening between more enlightened people about the complex issues raised in that thread. I’m going to link to some of my favorite posts, but I have to go get tattooed so it’s not going to happen now.

Cree, Health, HIV

Life Expectancy

There’s this amazing thing I found on the internet last night, a Life Expectancy calculator. I will live to be 81, barring any unforeseen events occurring. And actually, that should read 91, if you believe lesbian HIV transmission stats. I answered one question admitting yes, I have unsafe sex, but it didn’t ask if it was lesbian unsafe sex.

There’s a huge debate about women to women HIV transmission. The statistics are misleading, because of considerations like sex work, bloodplay, occasional hetero experiments, artificial insemination, rape, dildos used on multiple partners within the space of a few hours without putting on a new condom, and I’m sure even more than I’m thinking of at the moment. It makes things very complicated, because at least two of the above risks lesbians face are completely written out of the statistics by researchers defining lesbianism in a really really specific way that cuts out a huge proportion of the lesbian community, like having a penis in your body at some point in your life automatically transfers you to the bisexual stats. And even then certain issues are not ever considered, like bloodplay. And if you’ve gone to a lesbian sex show recently, you know at some point something sharp and pointy is going into someone’s body.

So my risks for HIV transmission are basically that I don’t use barriers in oral sex and I rarely use gloves unless I’m doing something that might scratch my partner. I always use a disinfected dildo and/or condoms, I never use the same condom with two people or her and myself. I also never touch myself and then her without a change of gloves or otherwise making sure fluids aren’t getting mixed. Some people aren’t smart enough about that last one, which is why I ended up with a dumb STD that pissed me off. But I would drink blood should the occasion arise, and I’m trying to lower my risks around that should it happen. Oh yeah, it’s totally risky, I’m just considering the circumstances. Anyway.

So back to the Life Expectancy Calculator. It’s pretty amazing because it goes through all aspects of your health and then evaluates your lifestyle and gives you advice on improving and extending your life. So I’ve started trying to incorporate some of those things into my life.

One was to eliminate coffee from your diet. This is pretty interesting, because I do notice it makes me feel weird. They suggest tea instead, which is way healthier and has antioxidants in it besides. I also have to exercise more, which I tried today.

I took my cross country skis to the park today. I am so out of practice, it embarrasses me. I had a pretty good clip going on for about fifteen minutes when my cuz Deanna saw me from the alley and waved hello and I did a major pratfall. Getting up with skis on is also really awful. I kept falling until I just took the skis off. I was also in a foot and a half of snow, which didn’t make things any better. The experience of skiing was really interesting though. I felt muscles in my calves and feet that I didn’t know I had. And some shoulder, upper back, and arm muscles were saying hello and I hadn’t remembered their existence. I hope I get muscly again. When I did weightlifting a few years ago I started getting nice upper arm/shoulder definition, it’s still there. Anyway, I do like skiing. And I know I need the exercise. It’s not fat shame that’s making me do it either, I just want to feel more powerful in my body, like I’d have the health necessary to defend myself physically.

Another suggestion for keeping your brain healthy is to learn either a language or a musical instrument. The second best thing for you brain is puzzles. Puzzles are okay, but I really like learning. And learning Cree has been really interesting and just on it’s own has opened my thinking to new concepts specific to Cree and explainable only in the language itself. The etymology of words from pre-colonial to colonial language is fascinating. Literal translations illuminate so much of what Crees consider our current state of affairs. Even something like America in Cree meaning Land of the Long Knives is amazing. I’m thinking about the world in new ways, and I will even more once I’m fluent.

But why stop there? You have to keep your brain active your whole life. And I think especially for someone like me who does have brain centered health issues, I need to keep myself busy working with my mind. I’d like to learn more languages. I want to learn French, for sure, because we are in a bilingual country and even though their psych wards suck and they attack aboriginals, Quebec is a nice place. Never mind the holes in that last sentence, I’m not even going to bother explaining all my critiques of Quebec. Also if you learn French you can get government jobs. I also want to learn German, for various reasons. It’s a pretty funny language, some people hate it, but I actually like the way it sounds. And since world politics is currently dominated by fundamentalist Christians versus Fundamentalist Islamics, I feel a need to learn Arabic so that I can understand the world in a different way. For one thing, I really feel uncomfortable depending on translation and translators in negotiating discourse between groups speaking different languages. I don’t know that a right wing dominated media is going to accurately translate Arabic speaking Muslims. I also just wonder if the structure and words of Arabic lead to new ways of thinking the way Cree does. I’m sure it does.

Homophobia

Neglectful Me

There are a few things I need to blog about in the next few days. I have to take Judith Halberstam to task about something she said about queer youth, but I have to finish reading the essay before I go ahead, obviously. I wanted to talk about feminist transphobia and the tyranny of white based feminism, mostly due to some nasty ass blogger wars between some really HATEFUL white feminists and feminists of colour who seem to be going up to bat for transgendered people (and some are trans), but just reading all the threads seems to be taking up to 72 hours, and I have editing to do this week. I also really really need to say some stuff about Saddam’s execution, because I think it’s going to define the next year in Iraq and the events which will unfold. All I’ll say now is that watching that crap happen, I was just thinking “Oh wow, that was a REALLY bad idea you guys.”

Mostly what I’ve been neglecting is this incredibly scary news story going around. In short, nazi american scientists have been experimenting on homosexual rams and have come fairly close to altering their sexual orientation. And among the crowd of highly visible ‘mo’s, the only one who has come forward publically to take this to task and call it what it is, genocide, is Martina Navratilova. Why isn’t Rosie saying something instead of bashing Asians with her ching chong talk? Why is Ellen just sitting back and interviewing blatantly closeted homos? It boggles the mind.

So yes, genocide. Ironically I was talking about this with my mum and she said the world would end before it mattered that genocide towards queers was happening. I told her she wouldn’t say the same thing if Aboriginals were being carted off to death camps.

Apparently they are hoping to make a patch for pregnant women to wear which will keep them from having a gay kid. Ugh. It’s so disgusting, and yet of course no one will think it’s wrong, because eugenics doesn’t matter when queers are involved. Incidentally eugenics is also societally approved for mentally ill people.

I’m not sure WHY it is so hard to get people to understand eugenics. Because it has science behind it, people are more assuaged than if you see a line of queers standing against a wall in front of a firing squad. Eugenics seems more palatable. Who will miss the life of a minority if that life never has a chance to happen? I could also get into eugenics about the mentally ill, which my family supports incidentally, but I’m not going to go into that in this post.

If they really do insist on making a No Gay patch, is must be possible for them to make a No Heterosexual patch. I don’t think either is a good idea, but it would make an interesting movement to demand a method of eradicating heterosexuality in children if you so desired. If they’re really not homophobic, I expect my No Het patch to be readily available on the market in five years when I may have children.

I hope more dialogue and action happens around this. Here’s the story from PageOneQ.

Linkage

Best Fit Of Pique Posts 2006

I was going to wait to do this until I hit my four year anniversary of blogging. This blog actually started out as something completely different, but I erased that one because I was crazy.

The Horrors Of Personals
Fitting my identity into the little check boxes of online personal ads.

Butch-Femme Misconceptions
In which I blow away percieved notions of butchness by talking about being pounded with big dildos and my penchant for frilly lacy girly undergarments.

I’ve Heard The Crabs Screaming
The ethics of eating crab, Thirza gets squeamy about killing things, and a terrible rumour about vegans and placenta munching.

Message From A Scraling
Yucca Mountain, sacred First Nations site and now Nuclear Waste Storage facility.

Hands Up all the queer girls who are ogling the pepsi commercial
On Parker Posey’s pepsi spot, now gone!

Survival Tactics
How to stay unscathed by the stigma of mental illness. Ironically after the incident in question happened I did get in trouble at my workplace for having a disability. I later quit. I’m still in the process of getting a human rights complaint together, but people I know keep dying and stuff.

Youtube and Me, Happy Times
My favorite Youtube videos including French and Saunders, Margaret Cho, and Peaches w/ Iggy Pop.

Needles, Metal, Cute Girl, Oh My!
The joys of having a cute girl run needles through my body. Needles are fun. *giggle*

Thank God For The Library
All the books I read on my holiday road trip, a pic of me at Arches smoking a clove cigarette, and the indignity of taking poop to a cute girl.

C’mon and Drug Me Up
My best friend Margaret’s mental health bedside manner, dealing with The Snuffits, and by the way, I am still looking for a contingent to do an action of peeing on Ewan Cameron’s grave. In fact, I should get a list together of people’s graves I intend to piss on.

HK119
HK119! HK119!! HK119!!! I still don’t have this cd, eeeehn! I love HK119!

Killer Condom
This is my favorite movie and I don’t have it either! Okay, obviously I have some internet shopping to do.

Die-Die, Sweetly Die
Lesbian Vampires make me wet, and so does Parker Posey.

Hell in a Handbag
Blogger drama, what’s a “good” feminist and why do you get to say what a feminist is?
Fuck off with sticking me in your fucking ghettos, and why oh why are we all supposed to hate Courtney Love?

Medical Marijuana and My Mood Disorders
Thoughts on the debate around psychiatric illness and the use of medical marijuana. By the way, I tried to join a Yahoo group for medical marijuana users and they wouldn’t let me because I identified as bipolar. Dorkasses.

Mohawk Ironworkers and The World Trade Center
An Aboriginal take on Sept 11.

The Hottest Biracial Bitches
Musing on biracial identity, and wondering about it’s link to my penchant for hot bisexual women. Living beyond binaries is sexy dammit.

What the Fuck Is That? UFO Sighting
This was a goddamn true story and it STILL scares the shit out of me. I have no idea what I saw that night, but it looked like something was coming from another dimension.

Paranoia’s Origin: The Half Used Pencil
How I ended up being a paranoid human. And white people have some fucked up weird paranoia’s yo.

Coming Out Day
Closeted Lesbians who MUST come out!

The Hays Code and it’s Continuing Influence on Queer Subtext in Media
Yeah, this post is basically exactly what the title says. Subtext is a curious creature.

Poorest Postal Code
Life in the pooerest postal code in North America.

People, They Want to Touch Me
People, They Want To Touch Me
You really don’t know who Nina Hagen is? REALLY??

I was going to list some of my favorite December posts, but they’re right down there. The only thing that needs reiterating is: Nicole, YOU REALLY need to find another merkin. Yours is way too high maintenance just for some sham het love!

2006 was an okay year I guess, for me personally. Some good stuff happened, and some bad stuff happened, there was a death in the family, I had to quit a job that was making me sick, I got two animal friends, someone kissed me, I got into Transmediale, but not into Berlinale. Two books came out that talked about my work. I got to know my family again. I left a mice infested slum apartment back in Vancouver. I did enough mushrooms to trip out. I got a couple more body mods. I finally see the allure of marriage and children. I’m learning to self-reference and I trust my standards and values a lot more. I saw a UFO, and was terrorized by a knocking ghost, and have spent time in the company of a poltergeist AGAIN because once wasn’t enough apparently. I finished my screenplay, yeah, that’s a big deal, even if it’s not a final draft yet. I’m adjusting to using the internet to do most of my interacting with like minded people since I live in SASKATOON!!! Aaaaaah! I live in Saskatoon!!! Oh bugger, I’ve had to nurse the links on this post back to health THREE TIMES!! I think that’s a hint I should just hit publish already.

Happy New Year!