It doesn’t matter, because I’m burnt
Cream Pan and I share the same secret.
The Butch Jobseeker
As long as I’m talking about butch experience that other people, even femmes, completely fail to recognize, I thought I would talk about the personal economic impact of having a butch identity. Also I was inspired by a blog from Cameron at Gender 3.0 (which you can find under the surf with me section here).
There are some people of colour who sneer at queer rights activists because we can hide, while their difference is obvious (which is a stupid idea because I’m a POC and I’m not obvious). Okay, maybe some queers can hide, but not fuckin’ many. And especially not butches. And being butch is not a fashion decision, believe it or not. I don’t stand in front of my dresser pondering on whether to go with something girly in the extreme or my standard boy clothes (jeans, t shirt, bunnyhug, sneakers). Even when I do girl drag I still feel completely butch and miss having belt loops to stick my thumbs in.
I do, however, spend a loooong time trying to decide on my clothes for job interviews. Everybody does this, but not with the same issues as a butch woman. I have to balance my identity with corporate expectations of gender normativity, and no matter how carefully I choose my clothes, I fail the gender normative test every goddamn time. And I can so tell. The employer can be all excited about my qualifications but as soon as my butch self walks into the office for the interview, it’s over. And not only that, but both s/he and I know it’s over and for what reason, but we still go through the motions. They ask a few questions just to make me feel like I’m being considered, and then it’s over, shake hands, we’ll call you, and an hour of my time is wasted and I leave feeling humilated and without any method of redress.
So yeah, hard time finding jobs. The ones I do get are usually with people who know me. Sometimes butch dykes will tell each other where the few employers are in town that are dyke friendly. If this degrading job discrimination wasn’t bad enough, most people in my life (who are not butch) pester me about when I’m going to find a job, as if it’s in my control, like I can just walk into an office and say “I’m here, I will be working out of that corner office with the windows, thanks!” I’ll mumble something about being butch and that making it difficult to find work, but they don’t accept that as an explanation, because they don’t see butchphobia because they don’t know how to recognize it.
I always had a theory that being butch hinders my employment options, but I didn’t feel backed up in my theory until Cameron from Gender 3.0 said there are studies which show butch women have lower average income than femmes. It blows that whole theory out of the water that butch women are pretending to be men to access male privilege. Tell me honestly how many mainstream people treat butch women with the same esteem as bio men. And while femmes have a lot of struggles for sure, being gender normative is a huge privilege that I will never have. I had one girlfriend who totally recognized the privilege she had being high femme, which was nice, but not many other queer women recognize it. I can see it when I talk to femme friends who are job hunting, they end up with new jobs at a much more frequent rate than I, they get more interviews, better pay, better treatment. They don’t have someone go cold when they go for the interview.
Now I’m trying to keep myself steadily working on my own film career, which in some ways is good, some ways not so good. I’m still butch, still talking about being genderqueer in my films, even if I’m not saying it out loud. And I’m not entirely convinced yet that Telefilm is going to give me a million dollars to make a film about a butch woman in a psych ward. In fact, I keep getting turned down by various places when I pitch this freakin’ film. And if I won’t get funding for this, I’m dubious that I will get funded for a film about hunting down a white murderer of aboriginal women and having an extended beheading scene at the end. But who knows, maybe I will end up with like, six screenplays and one day people will be less discriminatory and someone will actually want to produce them.
Or maybe they will end up dusty in an attic, I will die penniless and alone, and fifty years hence some feminist will unearth my manuscripts and call me a forgotten genius and I’ll end up in some art history text. Poor Thirza. She was too many things too many people hate and no one ever knew what an awesome story teller she is.
And what will I do for a living? Call centres? Dear lord, someone enforce laws against discriminating on someone based on gender, and I mean all genders, not just Men and Women.
Trying to get out of being stone
Stones are interesting things. People ignore them all the time, or kick them around, or use them to hurt people. They don’t think about how old a stone is, or that it’s alive and has it’s own soul. Once in a while I meet a stone that wants to go traveling with me. I like it when that happens, they’re good company. You just carry them around until they let you know they’re ready to sit someplace for a while, maybe back where you found them, maybe somewhere new. Stones deserve to be respected, they have feelings like anything else.
Same with people who turn stone. I suppose it’s a term for post traumatic stress disorder that is specific to the lesbian community. I know femmes can be stone too, but mostly I only know the subjective experience of being a stone butch. I think a lot of butches can wind up being stone. It’s a process, I started going stone early, and then shit just accumulated until I am where I am today.
Stone butches are probably the ones you most hate, if you’re butch phobic. We’re the ones that seem hard and cold and suspicious. It’s not that we’re really like that, it’s just that we learn after enough pain that in order to survive you have to keep from showing emotions. Even if someone is hurting you all over again, you just go away and try to maintain this impervious exterior. Getting diagnosed with a mood disorder put the final nail in the coffin of expressing emotions. I mean, when your emotions are considered pathological and grounds to be incarcerated in an abusive prison, you don’t often express them unless you know for a fact the person you’re with isn’t going to toss you into the psychiatric hoosegow.
I don’t like being stone. I doubt anyone does. There are a lot of different ways to be stone. The commonality between all types is a fear/avoidance thing about being touched, specifically due to triggers. Touch is supposed to be the most important thing for the mental well being of a person, but being stone shuts a lot of that out. Some people can touch me though, without me cringing or shrugging them off or slapping the shit out of them. Not many, and I really have to trust them, and you’d be surprised who I don’t trust in my life.
Coming out of the hospital I could feel myself going into the most intense type of stone anyone could be in. I sometimes wonder if a touch or a hug or just someone acknowledging I went through extreme emotional torture would have stopped the process. It’s really curious. Unfortunately the majority of my friends roundly rejected me after I got released, so I guess we will never know.
It’s sad, I guess I feel like parts of me have died every time I’ve gone more and more stone. Maybe they have, they’ve changed me anyway. Or maybe those parts just went somewhere deep inside until it’s safe to come out. I dissociate a lot. I don’t know if I have DID, but I know it happens. When it does it feels like going to a dark quiet spot in the back of me, kind of like hiding under a bed. And then auto pilot takes over. I don’t know if people can see it from the outside, who ever auto pilot is she knows me really well and can pull off pretending to be me. I can watch her talking or experiencing something but I’m completely disconnected from her. When she’s having a conversation it feels like listening from underwater, and I have terrible recall of what was said. And then sometimes I dissociate and it takes auto pilot a while to kick in, which I would think would look like an obvious glitch but I don’t think people are perceptive enough to recognize it.
I’m lucky in that I’m not completely stone, there are some people I trust, and there is at least one person right now I feel safe being close to. It’s kind of a relief to know I can express and receive physical affection. In fact, it’s the first time I’ve been touched lovingly since I left the psych ward. It feels like coming home to myself. I think people who aren’t stone can’t understand the feelings involved. I guess it’s just that after all of that stuff happened, it’s amazing to be recognized as a sexual desirable person who needs to be held and kissed and coyly flirted with. It’s not something just anybody can do with me, for sure. I wasn’t sure anybody would do it with me actually, which is really scary. I hate to say I need a woman to be saved, but it’s true that getting out of being stone means finding someone who’s touch is actually desired, and usually that’s a lover. I don’t know that this person will ever be my lover, but she can touch me and I don’t cringe or feel weird or anything, I just feel like I did before shit happened to me.
I don’t know how else to explain being stone. But there’s a song by Evanescence that describes it perfectly.
A Message From AIM Just In Time For Christmas
I’m sleepy, but I wanted to throw this statement from AIM on my blog for something to consider when you go to movies over the holidays. I don’t normally support NOT seeing a movie just because it’s problematic, but in this case I would advise people to wait until it’s on video or tv, just because paying to see it makes the capitalist system justify racism. Yeah, so no Apocalypto.
**************
Holocaust Denial In America
December 19th 2007
David Duke, in a Holocaust conference in Tehran, was big news in America as he accepted an invitation by the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In Duke’s speech, he said the purpose of the conference was“ to offer free speech for the world’s most repressed idea, Holocaust revisionism…and the condemnation of the shameful imprisonment of European scholars and academics who simply dare to state their opinions of historical events that occurred over 60 years ago.”
Duke went on to say “ I as a former American elected official will be condemned by the Zionist influenced press in America for coming here in peace and friendship to a nation that they hate: the nation of Iran.” Overwhelmingly, the media in America condemned the Tehran gathering and labeled it the “Holocaust Denial Conference” but on the question of the many other Holocausts, the American media remain stunningly silent.
For indigenous people, Holocaust Denial in America is nothing new. Revisionist history is nothing new, but rather it is big business supported and financed by multi-nationals like Walt Disney and Hollywood A-list actors like Mel Gibson. They will not go to jail for distorting history or justifying the slaughter of Mayans. They will make millions of dollars in their revisionist movie, Apocalypto. Mel Gibson’s version of Mayan history is based on the lies of Spanish conquistadors and men like Bishop Diego de Landa, the Franciscan monk who, on July 12, 1562, burned hundreds of Mayan codices and over 5000 Mayan “cult” images. He later tried to justify his crimes, his Inquisition and torture of Mayan people by stating he had found evidence of human sacrifice.
The real savages, the Spanish Conquistadors, hacked off the limbs of Mayans for not bringing in enough gold and silver ransoms. They justified their savage crimes by deliberate lies depicting the Mayans, Incas and Aztecs as sub humans who sacrificed humans to the sun god. In this movie Mel Gibson does the same thing. He depicts the Mayans as sub-human, grotesquely violent, and incapable of compassion. The American Indian Movement condemns Apocalypto as revisionist history, in the same vein as Rambo, John Wayne westerns, and hate inciting movies such as G.I. Jane.
The historical evidence of the slaughter of Jewish people in the Nazi death camps of World War II is irrefutable. Any movie or documentary that denies that evidence should be roundly condemned and censored. No movie should profit from justifying the killing of Jewish people in the Nazi death camps. The American Indian Movement supports the Jewish people in seeking justice for their Holocaust and the recovery of gold and other valuables stolen from the Jewish people during that Holocaust.
The American Indian Movement condemns Walt Disney Inc and Mel Gibson for profiting from the distortion and revisionist history in the Holocaust of the Mayan people. The American Indian Movement urges world governments to initiate recovery of all stolen gold and silver taken from the Mayan, Inca and Aztec people. AIM condemns the piracy of so called “Spanish” doubloons recovered from sunken ships and calls for all recovered gold and silver to be returned to the rightful indigenous owners. AIM further condemns the Catholic Church and its institutions for unrepentant theft of Mayan, Inca and Aztec gold and silver, which is hoarded in Christian idols in Europe.
AIM urges nations worldwide not to stop there, but to demand that the United States restore to the rightful owners the more than $14 billion of gold stolen from the Black Hills in South Dakota, to the Dakota people.
The American Indian Movement acknowledges and thanks the small groups of activists and supporters who have protested the movie Apocalypto and condemns this movie as an act of greedy profiteering, of revisionist history and justification of the slaughter of indigenous peoples.
To our indigenous brothers and sisters in Central and South America who continue to struggle with intense poverty deriving from entrenched colonist policies, we offer our support and apologize for this outrage of a movie which is being pushed, financed and supported by Holocaust Denial in America.
Written by Chief Terrance Nelson, Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation, American Indian Movement Board Member Telephone # 204-782-4827, email chieftnelson@rrafn.com
Approved by American Indian Movement for general distribution
A different kind of child abuse
There’s a scene in the excellent movie Boogie Nights that always makes me cry. It’s when the future Dirk Diggler comes home after being wooed by the porn director and is confronted by his mother. She tells him his girlfriend is a whore, he’ll never amount to anything, and when he starts getting ready to run away screams that he owns nothing, everything is hers, and proceeds to destroy his possessions.
I didn’t have something exactly like this happen to me, but pretty close.
Even since I moved out of the house, I’ve been on a pretty long journey to figure out why I turned out feeling so depressed, suicidal, fucked up, etc. I started unravelling parts of my life and examining them. I had to name certain things that happened to me, which was really difficult. One of these was the fact that I suffered a lot of emotional abuse as a child. People often don’t know what emotional abuse is, or the insideous long term effects it has on a person. The only childhood abuse that gets any validation is sexual or physical abuse. I actually think the abuse I went through as a child is what kicked off my long struggle with depression.
With Christmas coming up I’m remembering a common past time among my mom, uncles, and auntie. All the cousins would be sitting around trying to be happy when one would be singled out for a prolonged ridiculing until they were on the verge of tears. It was bad enough to be abused like that by a group of adults who should know better, but to do it in front of our other cousins made it even more humiliating. Eventually when we had Christmas gatherings, the cousins were just really quiet, sneaking away to socialize with each other then coming back and trying to be as invisible as possible to avoid the annual ridiculing. It wouldn’t work, some kid would be trying to learn to be an individual and have different hair, or unconventional clothes, or piercings, and they would get picked on pretty severely. I’m actually surprised no one flipped out and started wailing on an abuser.
I had a lot of various kinds of emotional abuse happen to me, like being made to feel ugly, being “teased” until I cried and then being told I was too sensitive or that they were only joking. The worst though was when my mom decided I was out of line or was mad at me for some reason. She would ignore me, sometimes for a week at a time. She’d go to her room and not answer when I tried to talk to her, she would sit around in the living room and pretend I wasn’t there, we had completely silent dinners. I would be reduced to writing notes to her and pushing them under the door, and trying to decide between running away or committing suicide. As you can imagine, this all did lead me to have a very suicidal childhood. I didn’t hear of this happening to others until a friend of mine talked about being abused the same way. Both of us were children of single parents, so as you can imagine, being ostracised from the love of the only parent around was pretty shattering to a child. I only had my pets for a constant source of love, and even then they were used in this sick cycle of abuse, she would either threaten to have them put down or to take them away from me.
My only real outlet for talking about my feelings was writing my daily diary entries, which she routinely read and ridiculed me about. As an adult when I started writing in online diaries in order to reach out and connect with people dealing with the same issues as me, she also read my diary and defended her actions when I would get angry by saying if I was writing a diary on the internet it meant anyone could read it, including her. Nevermind that I was writing anonymously and dealing with some pretty heavy issues like her abuse (“you always write about hating your mother”), my sexual assault, various revelations about my sexual interests, trying to do healing.
It was hard enough being abused at home, but school wasn’t any better. Being an abused kid automatically makes you a target for bullying, so I had a pretty shitty school life. I hated school, but I didn’t like home either. I was one of those kids who wandered around alone a lot. Suicide was an escape hatch, I didn’t like my world and I was a kid with no options except to quit life and hope to god there was something on the other side. Later in high school I even seriously considered becoming emancipated.
I didn’t really start healing from my abusive childhood until I left home and found friends I could talk to about these things, cry with, listen to their stories, read about toxic families. I never felt safe confronting my mom about my childhood until I went manic, and then she threw me on a plane back to Montreal and helped get me committed. As you can imagine, I never felt safe confronting her about it again. And in a way, I know it won’t make a difference. She’ll never see her behaviour towards me as abusive, she’ll deny certain things happened, she’ll ridicule me for letting it bother me so much.
Recently she told me she was depressed so I had to be nice to her. I didn’t know what to say. I would like to be nice to her, but then I see certain things she still does that just fills me with anger now instead of sadness. Ever since I started dating as a teen she’s started a long campaign of hating everyone I love and trying to turn me against them. It’s really depressing. One older friend told me she was probably jealous that she would lose my love if I had a sweetheart. But it’s getting to the point where I feel like one day she’s going to make me choose between whatever woman I love and her, and I know I won’t choose her.
The one good thing is that the people in my generation, except for the ones who have become lifelong alcoholics, are pretty cognizant of how we were all treated as kids. We talk about it and try to figure out ways to heal or just to avoid continuing the cycle when we’re parents. We try to avoid the long standing grudges that are rampant in my parent’s generation. I know we won’t be perfect, even I notice myself doing the dreaded silent treatment at times, and I always feel ashamed and try to cut it out.
Maybe the hardest thing about dealing with my past is being saddled with the Crazy label. I was Crazy when I confronted my parents about abuse and neglect, and now that I have a history of hospitalization I know I’m vulnerable to being hospitalized again for stepping out of line or pissing someone off or just going through an emotional moment of healing around events of my past. Anytime I talk about my feelings I’m asked if I took my medication, and when I fly off the handle (something common to abuse survivors and people with rape-related PTSD) I’m accused of being a terrible broken bipolar person. My view of the world is consistently invalidated by the diagnosis given to me by people who know nothing of TLE, abuse survivors, rape survivors, or people suffering PTSD.
And I’m tired of not talking about this just because I’m worried it will hurt my family. They weren’t worried about hurting me. I would hope they would take this information and become more loving, compassionate people with insight into their actions, but I know it will probably be taken as an affront to their parenting skills and me just being mean.
What really made me realize what my abuse was, was when I dated an emotional abuser. She was charming, everyone thought she was amazing, but she was undermining me, invalidating me, taking me to parties with people I didn’t know and then abandoning me, and then eventually telling me I was a horrible lover. She even went so far as to bite me so hard I was trying to punch her head to get her away and ended up with nerve damage in my neck. Luckily I was seeing the emergency suicide counsellor I saw for two years and she helped me see that I had an abusive lover and it wasn’t my fault. I started learning about emotional abuse and seeing how it impacted my childhood.
Once I was talking to a friend who was an incest survivor about my abusive childhood and I was trying to say it wasn’t as bad as somethings that happened to kids. He told me not to minimize my abuse, it doesn’t matter what happened or didn’t happen, if I ended up with bruises or not, it was still abuse and it still had a major impact on who I became. In fact, studies have concluded that of all the types of child abuse, emotional abuse is the worst.
I don’t want to live in a rut caused by abuse, it sucks ass. I want to grow as a person and be capable of love without fucked up shit accompanying it. I think I am. My closest friends tend to be people who have also been abused in various ways, whether they name it or not. I wish my parents could get out of their own rut of abusive patterns. I know they’re only repeating the cycle laid out by their own parents, but I don’t think repeating cycles should be condoned.
This Christmas my wish is that families respect and love their children. I hope that parents realize they simply have the role of responsibly raising an individual who is not their possession and with whom they cannot dictate their life path. I hope that parents encourage their kids to pursue their dreams, even if those dreams seem unorthodox or foolhardy. I hope that at Christmas dinner, someone will engage a small kid in a conversation that doesn’t invalidate or ridicule them, a conversation that will make them feel they can be expressive and respected.
Imagine if kids weren’t abused how different life would be. I think most societal problems can be linked back to the formative years of all of us.
Self Test for children of Emotionally Abusive Mothers
Description of Emotional Abusive Mothers
A good article on emotional abuse in families and it’s effects on children
Sex Work
Being a dyke I’ve been intimately involved with sex workers both as lovers, friends, and colleagues. I think straight people get surprised by the link between sex workers and the lesbian community. The fact is, a high percentage of female sex workers are queer. I not only know sex workers, I was one for a very very very brief time. It was phone sex, it was terribly boring and silly. I pretended to have an orgasm while watching t.v., and then I quit when a foot fetishist kept asking for me, just because he talked and talked for a REALLY long time. I did, however, come really close several times to doing street based sex work. In that case, it wasn’t because I actively chose that kind of work, it would have been survival sex work. I lived in grinding poverty for several years in Vancouver, I often had no food, I skipped on my rent several times, I ran up bills I couldn’t pay, I had a very difficult time being hired for work, mainly for being a butch woman. Sometimes I had no phone. I wasn’t going to do sex work for drugs, I just want to go eat at least one meal in a day. And through all that I still self funded a video art practice.
God, let me say again, I have only ever gotten one grant in my entire career. I honestly don’t know where this idea that I’m getting tons of money for being an Indian comes from.
So yeah, sex work. My family helped me out some, but they did the guilt trip thing, and I never told them about wandering along the strolls wondering about getting into the next car that stopped for me.
I had a girlfriend who started doing sex work again while we dated. Friends were really fucked up about the whole thing. They thought she was some kind of low life (she was going to university), they felt bad for me dating her (no way, she was cute and sweet!), and one friend even asked me if I was jealous for her doing sex work. I had to laugh at that one. I didn’t really care that she was having sex for money, my only concern about her was the very real possibility of being assaulted on the job.
Some people say that the dangers sex workers face is exactly why it should be eliminated and more aggressively prosecuted. I think this is problematic, because it pushes sex work even farther on the margins. People who do Shame The Johns campaigns and push sex workers out of neighborhoods put these women into even more unsafe places, like industrial areas where there’s more isolation. The more prostitution is criminalized, the easier it is for predators to prey on women. Even filing a rape report if you’re in the biz becomes a humiliating venture where cops refuse to believe a sex worker can be raped.
If people are serious about keeping vulnerable women from doing sex work out of survival, they need to look at the bigger picture. The minimum wage should be raised, women’s labour should be more respected and improved, and for sure butch women and other marginalized people need to have more job opportunities. Consider how many transwomen end up in the sex work biz.
And there are sex workers who like their jobs, as much as people hate to consider. Some women I know have certain clients who are their favorites, there’s a certain level of intimacy that happens that while it is not romantic, falls under a category of therapy. While there are assholes out there, there are also a lot of johns who are genuinely just looking for some closeness and release which they may not get for certain reasons like age, disability, the recent death of a wife, etc.
I remember one time I went to visit my girlfriend when she switched from the streets to a massage parlour. We were hanging around talking with her coworker when a client came in. The coworker started laughing and said “Oh my god, what if a client came in and picked Thirza!”
Basically, I think that feminists pathologizing sex workers are misogynist and classist, and that the battle for sex worker rights should not be allowed to be dampened by women who infantilize the people doing these jobs.
Another thing, when people say sex work shouldn’t exist because it is demeaning, they should consider other jobs poor people often do which are equally demeaning. Outbound call centre work, McDonalds, Production Assistants, all of those are demeaning jobs which have a demoralizing effect on their workforce.
Sex, Romance, and Disability
Once I was asking my friend Ariel if I was being foolish by including my psychiatric diagnosis in some online personals. She said the best thing, “It’s an asshole filter!” It’s true. As much as I feel my romantic possibilities have been severely limited by having a diagnosed psychiatric disability, I also feel like I don’t want to be involved with someone who thinks I’m an idiot or will chase them down the hall with a knife. I could go on and on about the lack of compassion many people feel towards all of us with disabilities or chronic health problems, but it won’t change the fact that they are assholes missing out on hotties. And it won’t change the fact that at some point in their lives, without exception, they will be in the exact same situation as me.
It was pretty hard to be in my mid twenties dealing with psychiatric issues on my own and being treated weirdly, and definitely not being viewed as a sexual person at all. I think most mid twenties folks run away from someone they think is going to be too “high maintenence.” I think older people do too. I’m kind of glad I didn’t have a girlfriend when I went nuts, just because it would have crushed me to get dumped when I got released from the hospital.
So I haven’t had a really nice girlfriend since I went crazy, I haven’t had any at all in fact. But I also haven’t been involved with anyone abusive, which happened to me before. In fact, yucky girls have pretty much left me alone. So maybe the asshole filter does work.
The issue of being crazy and being into BDSM is also fraught with it’s own conundrums. The motto “Safe, Sane, and Consensual” takes on a whole new meaning. Can someone who is certifiably insane still engage in the sexual practice they’re used to? I say yes. Being bipolar involves long stretches of sanity, in fact, I’m sane far more often than I am insane. I’m sure some players would disagree with my continued desire to engage in BDSM activities, but those are probably the same people who if they were vanilla would be scared of me chasing them around with a knife. In fact, having a psychiatric disability has lead me to be extremely sensitive and cautious with my emotional limits and my levels of trust. I probably have more insight into my own emotional safety in certain scenes, particularily humiliation/degradation scenes. I also have a really clear picture of my possible triggers, and have already come up with ways to get around and past it. For instance, I know I’m going to have a really really hard time with bondage. On the other hand I know if I have a long detailed conversation about what I need to get through my first post hospital bondage scenes, I’ll probably be able to have fun with it again.
Yeah, I guess having a disability of any kind means some (or a lot) of people don’t want to date us, but on the other hand the people who do are more likely to be people who are able to have serious long term relationships. And that’s really the only kind of person I want to be involved with.
Ridiculing Bloggers
I admit, sometimes I do laugh at jokes disparaging bloggers. But at the same time, I think they’re an entirely valuable medium, I’m thinking of the vast groups of marginalized people talking about their lives and issues. Events are reported which never make the news, such as Iraqi’s who are blogging in Arabic and translating it to English. Blogs take up the slack where the mainstream media fails horrendously. I mean, one person owns nearly every paper in Canada, and they control reporting on Palestine/Israeli conflicts with a sympathetic bent towards Israelis. Reporters have failed miserably to ask the important questions, and Canadian reporters especially have restrictions on breaking certain important stories. I mean, if a Canadian journalist ended up with a CSIS document about aliens working in tandem with the Canadian government, we wouldn’t hear about it, they’d just give it back to CSIS.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the mainstream media wasn’t on this prolonged idealogical war against bloggers by making fun of us all the time as basement pasty losers talking about how many pimples we squeezed today. Obviously if they’re so invested in ridiculing us then they’re severely threatened by blogging. Take this lengthy diatribe on the downfall of civilization as caused by blogging.
I don’t always talk newsy stuff, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I can tell you stuff no one else knows or can talk about safely. Sometimes I just talk about my family or my animals. Sometimes I rant on the state of the Canadian Art World. Sometimes I talk about race and sexuality. Sometimes I talk film and media. It’s not following a definite theme or adhering to any kind of standard, but it’s still relevant. Same with all the other blogs I read. For instance, the news isn’t going to report on a transman being sexually assaulted when using the women’s restroom, but a blog will. You won’t hear the daily life of a family living in Bagdad on CNN but you will in a blog.
So basically, blogs are for people who’s voices aren’t heard. And that’s why the media hates us.
Early Christmas Present
I guess five days early isn’t so bad. My big present this christmas is a cross country ski package with fancy skis boots and poles. I haven’t tried them out yet, because I got all tired after work and slept and then we had to go buy presents. MORE PRESENTS. I bought 30.00 of candy. I actually bought it for a diabetic and now I have to think of someone else to give it to.
I haven’t cross country skied in years, at least thirteen years. I used to be really adept at it, terribly fast, able to go up and down hills. I once ended up on a black diamond trail when I was fourteen, I didn’t realize it was black diamond but it was suddenly really fucking hard with twists and turns and hills and steep slopes and I thought I was going to die halfway through. Then I finally stumbled back with my dazed dog to the cabin. He spent the rest of the night eating balls of packed snow out from between his paws.
The one embarrassing thing that sucks is when you take a spill and end up with a tangle of skis and poles and legs, all at terrible angles.
I found out it’s the best aerobic workout there is. I had no idea. It’s really fun, I could hardly think of it as exercise. So meditative. Even if you ski with someone it’s just not feasible to natter at each other. Anyway, I need some kind of winter sport because I hate just sitting around feeling lazy. And skating freaks me out because every time I go out on the rink I end up skating past a blood splot and get all woozy.
Beheading Holofernes
I didn’t get into Berlin. Bah! I’m applying to Outfest next, who actually likes me, but I’m not sure if they will take me. The deadline is at the end of January. Toronto’s deadline is in the middle of January. And I need a grant soon to work on something, but I don’t want a bunch of money to make a short. I know, maybe that is bad. But maybe I also just want to keep writing.
I do have an idea for a story that is REALLY dark, creepy, and terribly violent, with the climactic scene referencing Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemesia Gentileschi. There’s also a scene where a woman comes screaming out of the bushes with a knife in her head. People are going to think I’m seriously fucked. It’s a take on missing/murdered Aboriginal women, but with an I Spit On Your Grave approach to it. Hence the Gentileschi reference. No cutesy funny Thirza, I’m sorry, it will happen again someday. If this doesn’t creep you out, the film I want to do after this WILL end up giving you nightmares.
Anyway, for those who haven’t seen Judith Beheading Holofernes, here it is:
There are some who say this painting was created to deal with Artemesia’s rape by Tassi, who offered to marry her so that she would not have a damaged reputation or be considered damaged goods. When she charged him with rape she was tortured to make sure she was telling the truth. Tassi was a serial rapist and had also raped his sister. Oh, go google it, it’s an interesting story. Anyway, he was found guilty but got a slap on the wrist. Some things never change. Artemesia went on to have a running theme in her work of rape as seen from a female perspective. Of course this was all buggered up in a film made about her where Tassi is her passionate lover who mentors her in painting. That’s fucked up, ugh, I could go on and on about the sickness of a filmmaker who would glorify and romantize rape even admist copious evidence of Artemesia’s thoughts on Tassi. ANYWAY, as you can see, she painted Judith being totally unafraid and determined to behead Holofernes, which was a far cry from other Judith paintings where she turns her head away to avoid seeing the horrors of being an assassin. And this is a good example of why therapy as art is relevant.
This was probably my favorite painting in Art History. If it’s not Baroque, don’t fix it. Oh never mind, that’s a terrible joke.
I don’t know if it will get funded. Native women beheading a white man on screen might push too many people’s buttons, even though Native women are killed on screen all the time. It would be such an excellent image though. So yeah, I want to write that story while I wait for funding on my other film’s production to come through. I would apply to the Canada Council for production funds, but sadly 60 000 is not nearly enough. A screenwriting grant on the other hand would give me a year to write this next script. A year of writing, what a dream!