[Insert Pithy Title Here]

This is something I have not felt before. This soft, gentle love. A need not to belong but to be with. This is not young, this is not lust, this is not even a fast sexual thrill. This is slow, patient and kind. There is no desire; just longing.
I walk down the stairs instead of taking the elevator. The stairs take longer, give me more time to think. More time to convince myself that at the very next step, I'm going to turn around. But I get there, to her door, and walk past, just a bit--who knows why. Maybe to prove that I could.
I don't want to knock. If I knock, and she answers, then suddenly I need a reason to be there. I can not imagine her opening the door and myself saying, "I'm sorry, I just wanted to see you." And if she doesn't answer, if she's not there, somehow that is so much worse.
I do knock. Three times in rapid succession. I listen, intent, while edging slowly from the door, afraid that when she opens it I will seem too eager, too close. There is no noise inside. She is not there. But I knock again, twice, not even certain if it's loud enough to hear. My throat closes, and my heart beats faster. My eyes burn and water.
I take the elevator back.
I want to spend my life with her. Her life with mine. It's only 8 more months.
Somehow that makes it all the more important.

Taco Day

Sometimes, the cafeteria at school does themed meals. Every Sunday evening, for instance, is chicken nugget day. I'm not a big fan of chicken nuggets, personally. But every Wednesday at lunch is Taco Day: a plate piled high with brown rice, re-fried beans, lettuce, tomatoes, shredded cheese, spicy ground beef, and salsa, all mixed up into a feast of epic proportions. Taco Day is a good day.
Nothing changes on Taco Day. I am still the same person with the same problems. I am still the same overweight, badly dressed, butch dyke with bad acne that I have always been. The girl I am in love with is still dating one of my male friends, and she is still dying of AIDS. I still wake up at nights screaming and crying from nightmares and flashbacks. I still question in the darkness whether I am attracted to women primarily because I'm a lesbian, or because from the age of three my life has been one episode of sexual abuse and assault by men after another. I still am involved with a ongoing-for-the-past-four-years criminal court case with my ex-fiance and father of my dead daughter. I still have bipolar disorder. I still dissociate to the point of black outs when stressed, over-tired, scared, or excited. I still have to go to my therapist today and explain that Saturday I began cutting again, and Monday evening I overdosed on sleeping pills with the express intent of killing myself. And I still have to admit to her that nothing has changed in the past week or so; that for the past four years I have wanted to die, because I do not wish to live with these memories.
But today is Taco Day. Taco Day is good.
I don't know if this happiness at the thought of tasty tacos will last. I don't know if it will be enough to see me through the day. But for now, it is enough. It's enough to get up and get dressed, to grab a book and head over to the Alliance office while waiting for people to eat with.
If I manage to live past this current suicidal period, I am going to eat tacos more often.

03-01-2009: Gay Marriage

People in Maine who can get married by the state:

Christians
Muslims
Hindus
Buddhists
Jews
Zoroastrians
Pantheists
Agnostics
Atheists
Divorcees
Widows/Widowers
Convicted Felons
Teenagers
Parents
The Elderly
Schizophrenics
Immigrants
Veterans
Public Servants
House Servants
College Professors
The Illiterate
Women
Men
Hermaphrodites
Movie Stars
Porn Stars...


People in Maine who, currently, can not under any circumstances get married by the state:

Gays.

If you think homosexuality is a choice, and a bad one, than I'd like to point out in the CAN column: Convicted Felons.
If you think homosexuality is an illness, a disease, then I'd like to point out all the mentally ill people who are married and have families.

I am a gay woman. I am also a citizen of Maine. I work in this state. I go to school in this state. I pay my taxes, I vote, and I live my life in this state. Yet as a gay woman, I can not get married in this state. I can not gain the same rights that other citizens of Maine share, yet I share all of the responsibilities that other citizens do.
I am a gay woman.
Because I am gay, I am a second-class citizen of Maine.

For those of you who already support Sen. Damon's bill to allow civil marriage to all citizens of Maine, regardless of the biological sex of the couple, thank you.
To those of you who don't, why? Please, tell me. Tell me why you believe that because of my sexual orientation, I do not have all the rights other citizens of my state do. I want to understand your points of view, but I don't. So please, explain it to me, as I and the rest of my community are trying to explain to you.

CIVIL MARRIAGE IS A CIVIL RIGHT.

02-14-2009: "What Flavor of Man is He?" (Past Post)

I was talking to my parents today about recent events at UMF. I mentioned how the Spring Fling theme is "Show Me the Beaver" but on the T-shirts people are designing, they aren't allowed to reference UMF because of the "sexual" nature of the slogan. I also told them how student groups were not allowed to use the word "beaver" or a depiction of it, as it was too sexual (despite the fact that the University store can). I think this arose from the "There's Nothing Sweeter Than A Healthy Beaver" shirts from a while back.
My mother shared my feeling, that if the Spring Fling theme is too sexual to be associated with the university hosting it, perhaps it should not be the theme.
My father's response was as follows:

"What a bunch of Puritanical, Fundamentalist tight-asses!
I think that someone, maybe an active, community-minded student, a leader in an organization, perhaps, ought to get together with some people and write a letter to the administration.
Maybe the Alliance could get involved? You could write a letter to the President.
'We, the Alliance, wish to change the school mascot from the beaver, which is a highly suggestive sexual term, to the vagina, which is of course a scientific term and therefore not suggestive in the least.
Oh, by the way, you're all acting like c*nts.'"

I love my family.

01-21-2009: Women's Studies (Past Post)

I picked up the book Listen Up for my Intro to Women and Gender Studies today. Flipping through the book, I found an essay titled "Don't Call Me a Survivor." I was compelled to read it, as I so often am with things that I suspect will trigger memories and feelings I would rather forget and not have.
Our stories were so similar. It was not the action of rape itself that I believe got to me. But the pain, the betrayal, the fear was all the same. The realization that as a woman, we have only the power that the men in this world allow us, was the same.
I came to Women and Gender Studies because I was powerless. As a woman, I was powerless. I had been told all my life that I was equal, that I had every right and every power and every ability that men did, while at the same time being bombarded and invaded every day by the subliminal and overt messages that in fact, women were nothing compared to men. We should be seen, not heard. We were trophies, we were models, we were accessories. We were adorable, we became cute, then hot, then sexy. We were valued not by our contributions to the world but by our contributions to the lives of the men in the world. We are expected to submit, to be retiring and accommodating. And though our bodies belong to us and us alone, a man has if not the right than the ability to take even that from us and make it nothing but a tool for himself.
We are told that we should stand up for ourselves. That our body is our temple. That our body is ours. But so many times we are told that if we are attacked, if we are molested, mugged, or raped, that fighting is dangerous! That our lives are worth more than our ownership of ourselves. So many times, in emergency rooms, in therapist's offices, in psychiatric wards across the state I have been told that I did the right thing. That giving up the fight while still alive and allowing myself to be raped was right. That letting him have his way with my body was the right thing to do!
I came to Women and Gender Studies for power. To be able to stand up for myself again. To take back my life, my body, my world. I came to this major to stop myself from being raped again. To keep myself from being attacked again every night within my dreams, and every day within my memories. I want to help myself be a woman, and to help every woman and girl have the power that we were promised as children.
Ownership of our own mind, heart, soul and body is our right.
Power is our right.

01-20-2009: Gay, Homosexual, or Queer? (Past Post)

So in my Gay and Lesbian Literature class today, one of the girls spoke about how she was unsure of the sense of using the word "queer" to describe a person, a piece of work, or part or all of the queer sociopolitical movement, as for many people both in and out of the community, it has extreme negative connotations and is sometimes used as an insult.
I use the word all the time, and describe myself, my gender, my sexuality, and my gender representation as "queer." But it got me to thinking, particularly as she made an important connection between "queer" in the gay community and "n*gger" in the African-American community.
I can understand that for many people, "queer" is a negative word, and one to be avoided. But for myself, it seems to be the best label to put on a person (myself) and a movement that contains a varied and diverse group of people.
Towards myself, I use the word "queer" as it's the only label out there that I feel really fits. I've been attracted to and been in relationships with males, females, transgendered persons, and people who do not fit into the binary or tertiary gender construct that our society currently tends to use. Therefore, I'm neither gay, nor straight, nor bi, nor tri. As well, I don't think of myself as female. Nor do I think of myself as male. I am certainly not transgendered, either; I think I was born into the right body and gender, just that there isn't a word for the gender I was born to. For myself and I think for many others, gender and gender representation is far more fluid than people are willing to admit. So the terms female, male, trans, or even androgyne do not fit me as well as I would like, and therefore I don't use them as labels.
Humans use labels all the time. It's how our brains connect things, and make sense of things. I've spent far too long letting others assign my identity and label. So I choose the label "queer," because it's the best one I've found that fits. I would much rather have a label that means diverse, confused, or ambiguous rather than one that simply does not fit me. A nondescriptive label fits quite well, seeing as I refuse or am unable to describe myself.
For the queer community, I think queer is the best term as well. We are more than gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people. We are more than homosexuals. But we are less than the full sum of all humanity. We can't be the "gay" movement and we can't be the "human" movement. We are neither one nor the other. We are a varied and diverse group with as many sexualities and genders as the amount of individuals in the community. We, as a group, can not be defined with one or two terms. And yet if we attempt to define ourselves by all the labels of all the people in our community, we end up with an unwieldy phrase that would never fit on a placard or poster: The "Gay-Lesbian-Bi-Trans-Quee

r-Questioning-Allied-Homo-Hetero-Tri-Pan-Omni..." Movement. The acronyms that we've used and have been used in politics and media also suffer from this same problem. GLBT, the one most often used, only accounts for a fraction of our community; only the gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transexuals are represented. If we attempted to represent everyone through an acronym, we'd end up with something beyond "GLBTQQAHHTPO..." Which no one would ever remember or be able to make sense of. So a small word that is (currently) able to encompass all of us, such as "queer", makes the most sense to me.

11-10-2008: Mortality (Past Post)

When I was younger, I'd spend a lot of evenings with my father, driving around in the van and listening to NPR. My father and I have always been lucky enough to be able to subsist on a comfortable silence; we rarely feel the need to feel a space with words, when the space itself is enough. We'd often listen to programs like "Fresh Air," "All Things Considered," or the "BBC World News." I learned a lot about politics, about geography, history, society, and ethics.
There were many times when a program would begin to talk about new drug trials, or the rising cost of health care. My father and I would both become animated during these programs, both arguing with the radio about the social systems of our country that allowed people a basic human right, life, based upon their income.
I would often make the argument that "Well, what can you do?" After all, a person with a chronic, debilitating, or terminal illness needs the medication to stay healthy, or even alive. No matter what the price is, it has to be paid. My father would invariably disagree. I remember once he told me quite bluntly, "You know I'm sick. And my medication is expensive. I've lived a good life, I think. And I don't know, I'll keep taking it for now, but maybe one day, once you kids have all graduated and are out of the house..." He stopped there, and silence settled down again between us. But my father and I, both experts at reading silence, knew what he meant. It is my life, and my choice.
In high school, a friend who had been battling a rare form of cancer died our sophomore year. At our Senior Candlelight, his sister read an essay she had written about his death. More specifically, about how he decided he was going to die. The family had known for a long time that the expensive, time-consuming, and painful treatments were only doing so much. The cancer was not going away. One day he told them, "I'm done." There was too much pain, both for him physically, as his body succumbed to both the cancer and the ravages of the chemotherapy, and psychically, watching his family and friends suffer, watching himself suffer. He died shortly after.
Dylan Thomas once wrote:
"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
And it does appear to be human nature, and an evolutionary imperative, to fight against death. Recent research has shown that human beings are unable to imagine a time when they are no longer here. We can not picture our own deaths, and believe death to be possible for ourselves, no matter how much we see it happen to others.
But death will happen to us all. Like it or not, it is the final chapter of a life. We are born, we live, and we die. A person can not always know when, where, or how they will die. Death is often an accident, or a violent event that was not seen coming. But sometimes we catch it, stalking us. For some, Death does not wait patiently, it actively seeks one out.
People have the right to live as they choose. And as death is the final act of a life, they have the right to die as they choose, if they are given a choice. We may not always agree with that choice; we may fight for a friend, feeling that they are not fighting hard enough for themselves. We may rage and rail against them in anger, frustration, and fear, as they refuse to take medication, refuse to stop damaging habits like drinking, smoking, cutting, promiscuity, or other self-injurious behaviors.We may not understand their firm belief that the quality of their life is far more important than the quantity of years they live. We may decide that they are wrong, that they have made the wrong choice, that perhaps they are crazy as well as sick, to choose not to fight with every last breath.
Our opinions do not matter.
It is not our choice.
A friend's death is haunting, terrifying, and debilitating to those left behind. And those left behind will invariably wonder if there was something they could have done to prevent it. It will hurt, and it will scar, and it will affect us in ways we can not yet begin to imagine. Yet it is not our life, and it is not our death. I firmly believe we have not the right to dictate how a person lives, or dies. I firmly believe this is a decision that lies with the person making it, and no one else, no matter how close to them we are, how much we care.
If you truly want to help a friend live, then help them live. Support them, love them, laugh with them, hold them, cry with them, live with them, hope with them. But you can not die with them.
You can not stop death. Death is not an illness, and there is not and never will be a cure.

"You can not give somebody joy; but you can find it by trying.
You can't save someone from death, but you can love them while they're dying."
-Gratitude, "The Greatest Wonder"