QueryLily
"...I would never have thought of askingHow you'd got that peculiar name..."
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QueryLily"...I would never have thought of askingHow you'd got that peculiar name..."
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"Sooner or later, we will find ourselves pressed to convey the truth about our identity, and it's not easy to sum up in a sound bite. Homosexual desire is innate, but the decision to build a life around it is a choice. In this respect, gayness is much like a faith. Most of us are raised with a religious identity, but we decide whether to live by it or not. Just as the Constitution protects that choice, our struggle is to extend freedom to the crucial arena of gender and sexuality. That's ultimately what our movement is about: the right to be gay and to express it."
-Richard Goldstein, reviewing the Year in Queer in the Village Voice.
[24 December 2001]
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I'm a little bummed today. I don't feel like going to Larkspur this evening, so I'll miss seeing friends and watching the gala holiday show by the fab Galaxy Girls due to my suffering collateral damage from the on-going war between my back and my mattress.
It's a lovely day, though. At least it was when I was outside just a moment ago. Blue skies, etc. I finished most of my holiday shopping last night. Just a couple of last minute items to pick up. I found some cool surprises for the grand-daughter and grand-son at The Other Change of Hobbit and splurged on some DVD purchases at Tower, including the Criterion DVD of Powell's and Pressburger's gorgeous film "Black Narcissus".
[23 December 2001]
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A lovely day to be out - if you have a rubber fetish. If you don't...
Last night, the grand-daughter and I saw Wes Anderson's "The Royal Tenenbaums" which we both enjoyed, then made it down to Movie Image and rented the DVD of the same director's "Rushmore" which we somehow missed when it came to the theaters.
[22 December 2001]
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worsethanqueer led me to makezine which led me to Dean Spade's interesting essay, "Mutilating Gender", which I have been reading and ruminating upon over the past several days.
[22 December 2001]
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Now listening to...The Byrds.
More Byrds' links:
Byrds Online Appreciation Society
[22 December 2001]
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I woke up late this morning, 7 a.m. on the nose. Yikes. No time for my cup of Peet's and my ritual tussle with Precious over the ownership rights to my lap and the business section of the New York Times. Had to get out the door and off to work.
After the busyness in the first part of the week, I think I'll spend today playing catchup on some neglected projects. I had a good session with the doctor last night, although I will admit that it seems the time went by in a blur.We're also changing my regular day to Tuesdays, a day which should work better for me.
This weekend I am thinking that I'll be able to catch some of the new films that are out and go a little northwards with some friends for the Galaxy Girls' X-mas show.
[20 December 2001]
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"Don't be afraid to go to hell and back
Don't be afraid to go to hell and back
Don't be afraid to be afraid"
I'm humongously looking forward to the Yoko Ono retrospective coming in June to SFMOMA.
I also found a 1968 interview with Yoko that brought back pleasant memories of sharing "Grapefruit" with an old friend.
[20 December 2001]
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Reading Present Attention yesterday, I was moved by the term radical spaciousness which brought me to these words from the mouth of the lion.
[20 December 2001]
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Looks like another busy week at work - at least until Thursday. Then maybe the pace will slow down for a moment.
[17 December 2001]
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Who's got Radical Fashion?
[16 December 2001]
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I'm not usually a fan of anything "requiring" Flash, but these rifts on the Fibonacci Series and the Golden Section from textism were just way too cool.
[16 December 2001]
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So the grand and I made it to the benefit last night, and while she escaped from her expected "baby-sitting" duties - due to a lack of customers, not slacking - I finally got to meet the delightful Carolina - and a co-worker and I engaged in a brief, but lively, conversation on the career of Angie Dickinson.
Recently, I was honoured to be in the list of web-sites linking to booknotes, a super fabulous resource for music, politics, and libraries.
[16 December 2001]
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What is brilliant sanity?
[15 December 2001]
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Along about Wednesday or so this week I came across an obituary for Frances "Betty" Holberton, a pioneering computer programmer. In search of more information about her life and work I stumbled upon an archive of oral histories at the Charles Babbage Institute which gave me access to a longish, interesting, interview with her.
And tonight? The grand-daughter and I are off to a fund-raising benefit. It's been a long long week at work. Many meetings and a touching, moving, memorial service for a co-worker. A "good" session with the doctor...is that because I couldn't seem to stop talking? or just the relief of a minor major mental download? (Yes, I actually felt lighter when I left.)
[15 December 2001]
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Oooooo a very busy day. And a visit to the fabulous doctor tonight. MMMMmmm...whatever will we talk about?
On another topic, and right under my nose, so to speak, I've found that there is a Youth Gender Project located in downtown Berkeley. Of course there are other resources for queer and questioning youth as one can find out from Berkeley's own Pacific Center. Not that I'm a youth - far from it - but as a former queer questioning closeted youth it's great to see supportive resources available in one's community. Of course, this is the Bay Area. But what about elsewhere?
[12 December 2001]
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I'm looking forward to this upcoming Saturday when I finally! get to meet dk's new friend. Now I just have to get through this busy week. Work, work work and oh yes, a therapy session tomorrow night. I'm hopeful that I won't have to go to a meeting immediately after therapy, but you never know.
Just this morning I finished my brief flirtation with the Robert Silverberg book, "Tower of Glass", which was an excellent read, and now I'm playing with reading Edmund White's "The Farewell Symphony". Oh the life of a book slut.
[11 December 2001]
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Thanks be to the always stimulating wood_s_lot for pointing me to what I missed in yesterday's Chronicle and for the path that led me to worsethanqueer and makezine.
[11 December 2001]
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Back to therapy this week after a short break. The last part of this week is packed with meetings, open houses and, perhaps, a memorial service for a friend and co-worker who died this weekend.
[10 December 2001]
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Some internal links are broken because I've been tinkering. I'll fix them soon.
[9 December 2001]
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Meanwhile, let us now praise...Robert Silverberg.
"Look, he would say , a billion years ago there wasn't even any man, there was only a fish. A slippery thing with gills and scales and little round eyes. He lived in the ocean, and the ocean was like a jail. Nobody could go through the roof. You'll die if you go through, everybody said, and there was this fish, he went through, and he died. And there was this other fish, and he went through, and he died. But there was another fish, and he went through, and it was like his brain was on fire, and his gills were blazing, and the air was drowning him, and the sun was a torch in his eyes, and he was lying there in the mud, waiting to die, and he didn't die. He crawled back down the beach and went into the water and said, Look, there's a whole other world up there. And he went up there again, and stayed for maybe two days, and then he died. And other fishes wondered about that world. And crawled up onto the muddy shore. And stayed. And taught themselves how to breathe the air. And taught themselves how to stand up, how to walk around, how to live with the sunlight in their eyes. And they turned into lizards, dinosaurs, whatever they became, and they walked around for millions of years, and they started to get up on their hind legs, and they used their hands to grab things, and they turned into apes, and the apes got smarter and became men. And all the time some of them, a few, anyway, kept looking for new worlds. You say to them, Let's go back into the ocean, let's be fishes again, it's easier that way. and maybe half of them are ready to do it, more than half, maybe, but there are always some who say, Don't be crazy. We can't be fishes any more. We're men. And so they don't go back. They keep climbing up. They find out about fire, and about axes, and about wheels, and they make wagons and houses and clothing, and then boats, and cars, and trains. Why are they climbing? They don't know. Some of them are looking for God, and some of them are looking for power, and some of them are just looking. They say, You have to keep going, or else you die. And then they're walking on the moon, and they go to the planets, and all the time there are other people saying, It was nice in the ocean, it was simple in the ocean, what are we doing here, why don't we go back? And a few people have to say, We don't go back, we only go forward, that's what men do. So there men going out to Mars and Ganymede and Titan and Callisto and Pluto and those places, but whatever they're looking for, they don't find it there, and so they want more worlds, so they go out to the stars, too, the near ones, at least, they send out probes and the probes shout, Hey look at me, man made me, I'm something man sent! And nobody answers. And people say, the ones who never wanted to get out the ocean in the first place,Okay, okay, that's enough, we can stop right there. There's no sense looking further. We know who we are. We're man. We're big, we're important, we're everything, and it's time we stopped pushing ourselves, because we don't need to push. Let's sit in the sunshine and have the androids serve us dinner. And we sit. And we rust a little, maybe. And then there comes a voice out of the sky, and it says, 2-4-1, 2-5-1, 3-1. Who knows what that is? Maybe it's God, telling us to come look for Him. Maybe it's the Devil, telling us what nits we are. Who knows. We can pretend we never heard. we can sit in the sunshine and grin. Or we can answer them. We can say, Listen, this is us, this is man talking, we have done thus-and-so, now tell us who you are and what you have done. And I think we have to answer them. If you're in a jail, you break out of it. If you see a door, you open it. If you hear a voice, you answer it. That's what man is all about. And that's why I'm building the tower. We got to answer them. We got to say we're here. We got to reach toward them, because we've been alone long enough, and that gives us funny ideas about our place, our purpose. We got to keep moving, out of that ocean, up on that shore, outward, outward, outward, because when we stop moving, when we turn our back on something ahead of us, that's when we're going to sprout gills again. Do you see why the tower, now? Do you think it's because Krug wants to stick up a big thing to say how great he is? Krug isn't great, he's just rich. Man is great. Man is building this tower. Man is going to yell hello to NGC 7293!" - Tower of Glass
[9 December 2001]
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Link and think, December 1, 2001.
[9 December 2001]
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