For the faggots

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The bus driver I rode with this afternoon wasn’t happy to find out that Pride was this weekend.  I assumed it was the traffic he had a problem with until he derisively spat “faggots!”

People rarely look at me and assume I’m a lesbian, but I froze, irrationally terrified I would be singled out in some way.  I spent the rest of the bus ride and the walk home angry at the driver and angrier at myself for feeling hurt.

Do you wonder what the point of Pride is?  It does seem to bring out the nastiest in the homophobes.

But I don’t celebrate Pride to try to convince people like my bus driver that queer people deserve better than the disgust in his voice; I celebrate Pride because the seemingly endless hatred still hasn’t made me bitter, because dancing is more fun than crying, because drag kings make me weak at the knees, and because nothing makes a homophobe angrier than an out and happy queer.

drag kings by fred koenig

Drag kings, photographed by Fred Koenig

How white?

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The new immigration law in Arizona is flat-out racist, but a lot of people have a hard time understanding how the law could ever have negative effects on people not breaking the law. The inimitable Dr. Isis lays it out for you:

This law, an unchecked open door to racial profiling, terrifies me.  Over the last month it has frequently given me pause to realize how often I don’t carry my identification.  I forget it in my desk at work or leave it in my car.  While I will probably never be suspected of being here illegally, I worry for people like my abeulos, who still speak with strong accents, my darker skinned younger sister, and my godson. I worry that this law will become a mechanism to detain Latinos when police have no other cause. I also worry that other states will jump into Arizona’s deep, dark pool of crazy.

But, I especially wonder about the ways my Latino hermanos will try to conform in order not to raise suspicions.  Not playing their music.  Not speaking Spanish in public.  Changing how they dress.  Eating bratwurst instead of carne asada. An entire population of people trying to just pass enough to not get detained.

How white does one have to act to not get detained by the police?

Human progress

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From Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog:

Say what you want, do what you will with all those fine speeches on evolution, civilization and a ton of other “-tion” words, mankind has not progressed very far from its origins: people still believe they’re not here by chance, and that there are gods, kindly for the most part, who are watching over their fate.

Choosing a lab for graduate school

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I’ve officially started my search for a graduate school.  Because of my migraines, I need to live somewhere with relatively constant barometric pressure.  Slow changes are ok, dinosaur teeth in the pressure plot are not.  The best places in the US and Canada for my migraines seem to be the Pacific Northwest, Southern California and Hawaii.  All I’ve got to do now is find scientists at universities in those places who do what I’m interested in doing.

Fortunately I’ve got relatively broad interests.  I’m interested in plants and what’s going to happen to them with climate change.  I’ve mostly thought about trees, but as long as I’m working with a foundation species, I think I’d be happy.  Figuring out changes in growth, reproduction, and survival is interesting.  So is figuring out what might happen after big mortality events – the legacy effects of all those plant carcasses.  I think being able to make landscape level predictions based on individual physiology is FANTASTIC.  I have experience with dendrochronology, but would be happy on a project without it.  I want a project that involves more modeling than field or lab work. Big, long term datasets make me VERY excited.  I’ve very recently started thinking that climate change might be a great opportunity for ecology to test some of our predictions about plant communities and invasive species and I would be happy working on a project that did that.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to use all CAPS in my personal statement.

So, I went through the biology/forestry/ecology departments at a bunch of universities yesterday and picked out some labs I might want to work with, but I thought I’d ask you all for suggestions in case I missed someone interesting.

What I’ve Noticed

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The existence of god in general might be difficult to disprove (as is the existence of invisible flying purple elephants), but the existence of a specific gods is all to easy to debunk.  For example, the Bible story and Jewish genetics don’t match at all.

Israel is doing a great job of getting on everyone’s bad side.

In light of BP’s abysmal safety record and incompetence so huge it seems deliberate, their current mistreatment of people cleaning up the spill isn’t at all surprising.  I wonder if this spill will push us towards alternative energy since this disaster is ultimately a product of our own habits.

The women-trapping-men-with-babies trope has a lot of traction in our culture, and while there are certainly cases where it does occur, it ignores that fact that controlling women’s bodies and reproduction has been and continues to be a primary way men control and abuse women.

Veggie and vegan diets aren’t necessarily better for the environment than diets that include domesticated animals, but eating bugs would go a long way towards creating a sustainable diet.

The media often does a terrible job reporting on science.  Ed Yong sets them straight on what the research actually says about acupuncture.

Crip Sex from Mia Mingus on Vimeo.