Passing

When I came out years ago, I was really confused by the term passing. In my history, passing was related to race, whereas in queer terms it means passing as male/female.

I think as a biracial person, most of the hate directed towards me had to do with the fact that I could easily choose to pass for white, abandon the race, and not bother myself with advancing civil rights for aboriginals. At least, to the outsider it seemed like an easy choice. But I wasn’t raised that way. Lightest next to my white grandma in a family a varying shades of brown, I just felt like I was a brown person. I confronted racism in elementary school next to my brown best buddies, I studied my history, I did everything a “good” upstanding Aboriginal was supposed to do.

But it didn’t save me the day some brown girls beat me up for being white and not afraid of them. What I remember most is their fury, and the way they kept denying that I could possibly be an Aboriginal.

It was a hate crime, from my own people. I was forced to reconcile the fact that I had white skin, and therefore more privilege.

I think I’m pretty obvious about my racial background. Still, for some people that will never be enough. They will always be jealous that I’m able to pass for white, not realizing the huge internal struggles that this poses.

Eggs

Eggs are a cheap source of protein. This is what I tell myself when I open the fridge and find only mustard, a wilted stalk of celery, and six eggs. I had devoured my spagetti and sauce, and the bacon had turned an unholy shade of green.

After living for a year on pizza by the slice, eggs have become my main staple as a person living in poverty.

Eggs can be cooked in a lot of yummy ways, unfortunately huevos rancheros cannot be created using limp celery and mustard.

I hate eggs. They have become a symbol of my poverty. They should taste yummy, but when they are the only option for consumption, they choke.

“It could be worse, you could have no eggs.”

True.

Sometimes I have tried to insert moments of poverty in my videos. Counting spare change, taking pills, but nothing has really captured the feelings of utter hopelessness and desperation that come with such actions. I’m thinking of other things I have done, re-roll cigarette butts, that’s a big one, go to the Carnegie, go to Coast’s free Friday dinners. Waiting in line for careless sandwiches.

And eggs, those eggs mock me. I want meat. I want stir frys and salmon and tofu curry. I want fruit and crackers and cheese, and beans, and I make long lists in my head late at night, imagining what I would buy if I got some cash. I’ve grown past the point of living on pizza by the slice and gyros and any other cheap fast food. I like to actually make myself food.

But what can you make when all you have are eggs?

Look Out!

I am ready to shake off a lot of stuff from my life.

Some people aren’t going to know me anymore after this summer. That’s a positive thing for me.

At this point I have a very very very low tolerance for people putting crap on me.

I am making space for new friends and lovers, so new folks, feel free to invite me out for a coffee.

I’m not quite sure who I’ll be by the end of it, or even where I will be.

Soon it’s time to drop the axe.

Condoleeza Rice strikes Again!

In case you missed that post, I once had a dream about making out with Condoleeza Rice.

It truly disturbed me.

Last night she was in my dream again, tight hairdo, pinched face, we were in some kind of a boardroom. I considered telling her about my necking dream.

Why do I dream of Condoleeza Rice?! Something tells me I have a politically incorrect bone for the lady.

I have negative 16 dollars in my bank account. I don’t know how I have MINUS 16 bucks.

I just need to survive a couple more weeks and an artist fee is coming in. Oh hurry scurry little artist fee!

I should write a letter to Condoleeza Rice and ask her to send me some money.

Someone keeps trying to tell me I am no longer a lesbian because of some meaningless experiments with boys. It’s pissing me off. So I haven’t played with ladies recently, so what. Why does that make me any less a lesbian than the first four years I was out and celibate because everyone my age was closeted and all the older ladies wouldn’t play with me because there’s laws against it? I don’t understand. Now I feel compelled to prove my lesbianism to someone who isn’t even a lesbian, it’s stupid.

Just because I’ve been single a long time doesn’t mean I haven’t fallen in love with ladies.

Plus I hate that lesbian identity is so fragile the slightest bit of penis puts it in question, whereas gay men can easily have casual sex with girls and aren’t challenged.

Goddamn phallus power. My Condoleeza Rice dreams are far more baffling evidence of my lesbian tendencies.

If anything my boy experiments proved conclusively that I am not bisexual. I could write a paper on why, but that’s just wasting more energy on something stupid, when I would much rather be spending more time with lesbians, meeting girls, and getting nervous and crushed out on them.

Tell a secret

I’ve never been diagnosed or treated for it, but I believe I have a mild form of epilepsy. I’ve only ever had one grand mal seiziure, I remember it clear as day. I remember the way the morning light came in the windows, and I was eating my cereal, probably fruit loops, reading Gary Larson and laughing my butt off. Then my funny bone hit the edge of the kitchen table and I was in massive pain, yelling owie. Then blackness. The next thing I knew I woke up on the livingroom carpet, soft face smooshed into the weave. My first thought was “It must be Monday. Time to go to school.”

There’s nothing else particularily remarkable, no further grand mal seizures, but I have petit mals. I get them quite frequently. I’ll just stare at a small spot and suddenly no information gets into my head. People could be having meaningful conversations with me and quite often I’ll “space out.” I’ve learned how to cover for it reasonably well, just nod your head in agreement once you can move again. There actually have been a couple of times I agreed to something that wasn’t . . . agreeable. People sometimes also assume I’m not listening to them, which is true but for a medical reason, and then they get all tetchy.

***************Bonus Secret!**********************

I commonly have auditory hallucinations. Ironically, these didn’t begin until I started taking pharmaceuticals to combat depression, then manic depression. There’s nothing particularily remarkable about these either, quite often I hear my name being called, during withdrawal from Paxil I kept hearing the sound of a huge truck passing by, sometimes just a pounding frequency. When I went really crazy I had very distinct voices telling me things, and church bells. But my hallucinations are pretty benign, and I cover for them pretty well so I can pass as normal. I’ve just learned not to react every time I hear something similar to my hallucinations. Unfortunately this sometimes makes me look a bit stupid or standoffish if it’s not a hallucination.

Montreal psych ward horror story bonding

Last night I did the something for the first time. I actually met a couple of folks who I knew only through the internet. It was a gas, and this girl had been in a Montreal psych ward too. When I tell people I was in a psych ward, they truly don’t grasp the traumatic horrors that occur there.

First off, you are not treated as someone with an illness, you’re treated like a criminal. For another thing, I think they take some kind of course in destroying the last traces of humanity, empathy, and compassion. Personally, I think a lot of the psych ward workers I met, particularily in Emergency, were probably the Gestapo in their past lives. You look into their eyes and it’s completely cold and soulless.

Then there’s the restraints. It doesn’t sound as violent as it really is. I’m all for consensual bondage, but when you’re put in restraints it’s really fucking scary. Usually it’s used as punishment for minor infractions, in my case I wanted to use the phone during nap time, and instead of having a rational discussion about why they had some rule against using the phone, I was drugged and tied down for three and a half hours.

Then there’s this absurd idea of medical care. They do not care about their patients. Drug em, feed em, let them watch television, that’s your life and it won’t get better until they decide to let you out. When I got first degree burns on my hands they didn’t give me proper medical attention until two days later, even after I went to them saying my hands were burned. My hands were in agony. Finally one of the few nice staff brought a doc to see me. So they gave me this special cream to put on my hands to heal them. Later, when I went in again, I still needed the cream, but of course I didn’t have a chance to get it before going to the bin a second time. I kept asking friends and family to go get me this cream, but they thought I was a delusional nut, so instead they brought me hand lotion which didn’t do shit for my poor burns.

That’s not the only instance I saw of poor medical care. A homeless man who came to the hospital had gone walking in snow and ice in bare feet in montreal. His feet were pretty cut up, and looked frostbitten too. No one did anything for him until I got mad at my shrink and pointed it out.

They don’t care about protecting patients from other patients. There was this gross old man who wanted to gang rape me and even though I protested, they put me in a small ward with him and a handful of other male patients. As a rape survivor, this totally triggered off a whole host of things, none of which helped calm me down and bring me to this mythical state they call normal.

Finally, they have a fucked up attitude towards anglos. If you’re an anglo and you end up in a montreal bin, they will not provide you with interpreters and they are adamant about not transferring you to an English speaking hospital, of which there are a few. Actually, not just anglos, I take that back, anyone who doesn’t speak French is left to try and make sense of arbitrary rules. There were a few people who obviously spoke very little French OR English, and I have no idea how awful that must have been for them.

Anyway, now I have a friend who actually understands how truly soul destroying a stay in a Montreal psych ward is. And that makes me feel a lot more relieved, less alone about the whole experience. I sometimes get so furious about how casual certain people are about my experience in the bin. I have no obvious scars from the stay. But I am a psychiatric survivor.

One day I hope to transcend from being a psychiatric survivor. I think that day is coming. It’s taken a lot of really hard honest soul searching, writing, crying, and most notably, coming back to life. I feel I died in the psych ward. But my own personal ressurection and living has made me a stronger person.

Lesbians

God bless ’em. I’ve spent nearly half my life proudly being lesbian. Then some questioning years, related to gender. Now it’s an identity I feel oddly at ease with all over again. Like a well worn leather jacket. Yeeeah! Women rock my world. They really do. Nothing makes me feel more electrified than feminine flirtatious energy. I love butch/femme identities and sexual frission. I love that my town is filled with brazen leatherdykes who love sticking needles all over their bodies. I love belonging to a sub culture. I love being a lesbian.

I want to write something in honour of all the lesbians I have known who have supported me and paved the way for me to be. And yet, thinking of all the wildly talented and hot women I know across Canada, I find it hard to express how truly blessed I have been to have them in my lives.

Instead, I present to you a montage of my top ten favorite lesbian moments in my life.

1. Riding the back of a butch dyke’s motorcycle through the streets of San Francisco one hot summer night.
2. The first time a woman’s breasts pressed against mine and I realized I loved female flesh.
3. Losing my virginity to the most gorgeous bisexual in grade 11.
4. Getting shy and flustered when Kate Bornstien liked my hair.
5. Getting shy and flustered when I first saw Annie Sprinkle in real life.
6. Butches bonding over fatty fried foods.
7. The time my vegan lover asked me in the middle of the night if I ate bacon.
8. Kissing a reluctant older butch in a courtyard in Germany.
9. Having romantic baths with my femme girlfriend who actually didn’t like baths and would always end up laying naked on the floor talking to me. Actually now that I think about it that was kind of weird.
10. Having meaningless sex with an ex for the purposes of art. Actually it was really fun but I was never allowed to tell her that.

Lesbians. God bless ’em.

The mice are back

God bless ’em. At least now I’m not so pitifully alone.

Pride weekend is around the corner and my dance card is empty.

Someone told me there is no sex in the afterlife. For shame!!

Can Pride 20055555555555 be the year I break my celibacy? I actually just meant to write 2005, but my five key sticks. I fear it may be a much more accurate assessment of my singleness.

More funny

News from Iraq.

Secrets and Rants

Hi, my Netscape is being a big jerk and won’t let me sign in, so I am on Safari. Anyway, I found a blog you all might be interested in. It’s called Post Secret and it’s a collection of mail art made by anonymous folks who tell a secret about themselves. Some are funny, some are sad, it’s updated every Sunday with new secrets.

I made a secret card to mail in this week.

And now for a rant.

So I spent a few hours cruising around Livejournal looking -seeking- for another community I would actually want to be a part of. But all the bipolar communities are full of whingers and all the lesbian communities seem composed of newly out lesbians still raging about how their families just don’t understand. I’m twenty-seven and I’ve been openly a homo for thirteen years, so this is all quite redundant to me. God, I’ve been through being an out homo in high school IN SASKATCHEWAN no less, and I hate listening to twenty-somethings who have just come out whine about oh, my mum’s an ass, and wah wah wah, and I just wanna say yeah, thanks a lot.

Thanks for being the homophobic twat who slammed me in high school to protect your reputation and then later when your hankering for pussy gets the best of you, now you want in the community. Well fuck you. I have nothing but contempt for homos who are too shit scared to be who they are when they’re a teenager. Thanks a bunch for leaving me and many other queer kids in the lurch, looking for allies and finding nothing. Sorry, that’s just my mood today. I know it’s scary to be a queer teen, but fucking christ, I did it in the Canadian equivalent of the Midwest so fuck you. And when you’re in your twenties you have way more options opened up for being in the queer community, so quit your whinging and go to a support group or a rally or a bar or something.