I’m going to miss swing tonight.
Pain
Sugarbutch asks “what’s in your box of darkness,” referring to this poem. I was reminded of this passage from “Musing on Pain, Love, and Others” by Laura-Zoe Humphreys in Bisexual Women in the 21st Century
Storyteller: Scrape of metal and a rustle as the white curtains close me in with them. One takes my hand in his, rolls the joints, pushes and prods. But my hand fails to speak. It is my turn to perform. “Could you describe to me your pain?” I have spent long, tossing nights preparing for this question. I have taken notes, I have begged my pain to be more clear with me. I have rehearsed my lines well. He nods, says to the others, “She describes it very well. She’s definitely describing joint pain.” I smile, tongue hanging, scratch behind my ear with my foot. Waving his magic pen and his diploma on the wall, he gives me a reference. Disappointed again. I am searching for the name, the word that will take this pain and ball it into a red-wrapped box of solutions, remedies, a course of action. I’m not searching for a Doctor. I’m searching for God.
Pain: Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of pain, I will fear no evil: for though art with me; thy forced smile and thy lab coat they comfort me. Thou preparest my body and my pain as you want them to be; thou anointest my head with drugs, my cup runneth over. Surely pain and desperation shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Doctor for ever.
Stage Notes: The problem is the medical system sees the body as object, as something separate from the self, from the whole person.
Pain: I am not one with this body, this pain taking over. Mind over matter, disassociation from this trap. It’s the only way to survive.
Stage Notes: Work with the pain, not against it. It is you.
Pain: Fuck your New Age holistic spiritualism! Next you’ll be telling me to make friends with my pain. Well I don’t want to take it out for a fucking coffee, fuck!
Stage Notes: Yet what about S/M? Pain is multifaceted, not always aversive but rather sometimes desirable. I’m not saying that a pain that chooses you and one you choose are the same, but could you not learn from this?
Blind Love: Once I asked him not to let me escape and he held me there. Asked him to make me take it and he did. And there was all my guilt and fear and obsessive questioning locked around my wrists and neck if only for a moment, my body tumbled free into feeling.
Storyteller: Sing that sweet sharp edge floating downwards darkly. Weed me stoned and I will fall into you as you rise into me coursing along our bright paths into tips of fingers, the eddy around a knuckle. Crawling into you, you free me. Buried under stones in hidden caves I swim in black pools. White pain glides fanged kisses over my naked skin, slides past my open, waiting lips, twines through me, becomes me.
What I’ve noticed
Beautiful liquid sculptures by Sachiko Kodama at Le territoire des sens.
China sets up areas for protests, then says no one meets their requirements to have a protest. When I lived in China, I found that no one liked to tell me “no.” If they didn’t want something to happen they just made some sort of strange excuse or obstacle.
This video is amazing if you’ve got an hour. Things like this make me want to change my major.
Minimum wage jobs
A while ago, my friend Marie recommended I read Iain Levison’s A Working Stiff’s Manifesto. I finally got around to it this summer. It’s fantastically funny and unfortunately true.
I get the newspaper and dig through the classifieds.
It’s the same old crap. “CAREER OPPORTUNITY!!!” screams an ad for a $6.25 an hour warehouse clerk. Then they mention that they drug test. Who are they kidding? They’re discouraging their target market. Who but a crack head would want an opportunity like that?
Uh oh
I might have committed to too much this semester.
Classes
- Plant Morphology
- Genetics
- Ecology
- Discrete Math
- Calculus based Intro Statistics
Clubs
- Botany Club, president
- SEEDS, web coordinator, field trip project co-director, grant writer
- Tri-Beta, liaison with Botany Club
- Associated Students for Women’s Issues
Work
- Project for Undergraduate IGERT award
- Project for Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology (UMEB) fellowship
- Webmaster for UMEB class
Next year, I’ll plan in sleep.
Some days…
My feet, my bicycle, and the buses are usually all I need. I don’t mind not having a car. But the buses don’t stop near the grocery stores, and today there are more groceries on my list than I think I can carry home.
What she said
From Helen Boyd‘s She’s Not the Man I Married
The overwhelming pressure to conform to masculine and feminine ideals – or die trying – is constant. The obligation to conform is also somewhat invisible and harder to put your finger on. It comes out in …. the funny looks I get pushing an elevator button myself instead of waiting for the guy nearest the panel to ask me where I’m going. Or the way a man might tell a woman he doesn’t even know to smile, as if it’s a woman’s job to keep up that cheery countenance for his sake. It comes in the form of subtle reactions, jokes you hear, ideas about what men and women are. And if you start breaking the rules, you start to feel cut loose, a little adrift; you don’t know why all the jokes other people are laughing at make you uncomfortable.