There is No Wife

There is no wife, plain and simple.

A comment in the Indy Star that was probably only half-joking asked me how Gary and I decided who the "husband" was and who was the "wife". I had referred to Gary as my husband in my post, which prompted his display of either his ignorance or what he thinks is humor.

Either way, I thought I would spend some time on this topic, which might actually be on the mind of even some otherwise enlightened people. In the above paragraph, I do not use ignorance as a pejorative. Ignorance can be a bridge if we want it to be.

Now how I'm going to explain things is from my view. That should be a given, but sometimes it isn't as much a given as you would expect. I do not represent Gay People but only my gay self. Still, I hope my perspective sheds light.

Usually when people are thinking of being a wife, they are meaning who is the "female". And, as is the mind of the typical American, that usually cashes out as who is the "female" when you have sex, which further cashes out as who is penetrated.

Sex and love reduced to penetration has an unfortunately rich religious history (Paul the apostle's writings, for example) which is probably why it is so maliciously pervasive. But there are a couple other erroneous reductions to roles that likewise contribute to misunderstanding of being gay that I think might make for a better first grasp than jumping headfirst into penises and where they go.

These other reductions typically lump distinctly different concepts together. They surely can be together, as many concepts can be, but it is the failure to mentally understand that they are indeed distinct that bring about ignorance.

The first, gender appearance.

Some persons are more comfortable to wear clothes more appropriate of the opposite gender. Now that is worth an essay in itself as to how "appropriate" gets constructed by a social group. But the point is, it is a commonplace enough notion that at our wedding someone asked us who was going to wear the dress.

I don't own a dress. Gary doesn't own a dress. We wear "men's" clothes as far as I know, as that is what we are comfortable wearing. This does not take a stand for or against men, gay or straight, who wear "women's" clothes. It is just to make the often lost distinction that being gay has nothing to do with the clothes you wear.

You can be gay and wear a dress. You can be gay and wear pants. You can be straight and wear a dress. You can be straight and wear pants.

Gender identity.

Some persons are more comfortable identifying with themselves (their societal "role", which again is another loaded word beyond the scope of this piece) as someone anatomically (by at least physical appearances) of the opposite gender.

This identity is separate from Gender appearance and sexual identity. An anatomical male who knows his identity is a female isn't necessarily attracted to men. He can be, or rather she can be, but the anatomy of the body's matching the brain's gender identification is wholly separate from sexual orientation.

For myself, and Gary's, our bodies anatomically match our gender identification.

The point is that all three distinctions -- sexual orientation, appearance, and anatomical matching -- can be present in any possible combination, and are. But they are always three separate components that have come together to make the whole person, rather than being automatically bundled up together.

So back to the person's remark.

I am a man, comfortable with being physically a man, who loves another man who is comfortable being physically a man, and loves me as a man. Could there be cases of "gay" that don't follow our form of being gay, and perhaps there is a "wife" present?

Sure. As I said all combinations are possible. Though the term "wife" itself is probably as loaded as gender-appropriate clothing.

And besides, I don't think the person making the comment was really trying to find out what my "combination" of identity factors was, but was simply confounding them into so much gay soup.

And as for the sex part of our lives...

Gary and I know where are parts go. And quite frankly, we're the only ones who need to know it.

And if you think you still need to know who puts what into which hole in order to understand what being gay is, I think you're still missing the point of all the words I've written here.

And I don't know what else I can say.

Feed Me

A simple click or two and on the above and you can "frequently updated information" available at your neuron tips. Well, not the above above, which is just a static image (sorry), but icons like it on web pages, typically nesting at the bottom.

It's a "Feed" button and one of the more popular feeds are RSS Feeds. Which I thought stood for Really Something Stupid, so never gave it much further thought than tonight when I was trying to decide if I wanted to put a Windows news gadget on my desktop.

Or rather, having decided, trying to get it in a fashion of news broadcasting that suited my needs. I first tried Google News and learned two things: RSS is actually Really Simple Syndication. Followed by this, I realized I was evidently Really Someone Stupid.

I clicked on the orange icon like I was supposed to do. According to Windows I would then see options for subscribing to the different feeds available. What I saw was:

I read and reread the Google instructions which informed me I could simply put the address in any reader... I clicked on the orange thingy again, hoping I maybe clicked wrong or something and still the above appeared. So I gave up on Google News (thinking to myself how good news would it be anyway) and went to the NY Times.

There after clicking the orange, and another "sub-orange" I actually got something that made some more sense to me, with the words "subscribe to this feed".

News at last and I could have stopped. But I thought science might be more my linking, so I thought I might subscribe to the Science Blog I have listed on my blog; but it would be through my desktop gadget. No such luck, as I discovered Its orange wanted me to use a host of different readers I'd never used before...

Meantime, I decided that aesthetically I didn't like gadgets on my desktop anyway and removed it.

I actually don't have anything on my desktop except the background; even the recyle bin is hidden. I use buttons on my toolbar for frequently used things and prefer a wide open, uncluttered desktop. The gadget idea was half-whim and half-thinking I should do a better job of keeping up with affairs of the world.

But on the other hand, is that even possible? I mean, even if I get the whole RSS thing mastered, and only get the feeds I'm interested in, how does one handle all of it? By handle I mean process, not just skim and sort as if by doing that we are actually turning the feed into nutrition for the brain. Does anyone have time to do anything meaningful with all this fed content?

And what about the content providers? Have you ever wondered who it is on the other end pumping out all that "frequently updated content" for you to ingest?

I mean besides that engineer guy who's written something like one million wikipedia articles.

Or are we all one in the same, just taking information in and regurgitating it back to one another with no  pause -- who has the time -- for digestion?

Wanting Willies

Okay, the title of my blog post here is a bit playful as a lot of fun things could be said about a certain kind of willy, let alone about wanting them. But here I'm meaning the kind of willy that for whatever linquitic reason always travel in packs.

It is the hair-raising kind of willies that can scare the bejesus out of you, which is yet another strange fear phrase we have. I'm not sure if Be is a twin to the Nazareth one or not, nor if Jesus stays when Bejesus leaves, but such things are for another blogpost.

Here, willies is not only a neat term, but also the title of a 1991 movie; an admittedly very cheesy movie and highly predictable if you're paying attention. But so what? It is still a fun one. And I love how it involves a story within a story: a story of boys camping out and trying to "outscare" (and outgross) one another with a scary and/or gross story that can top the previous one told.

Such a scenario isn't just situated in the realm of horror. Nor is it kept even in just the realm of fiction in general. Storytelling itself is the fundamental way we communicate, whether it is the fact-based storytelling of science, the faith-based storytelling of religion or the outright Mr. Roger's neighborhood full of make-believe.

It is an excuse to a boss of why we were late, yet also it is telling our spouse about the day we had, letting a friend know about a nice vacation spot, or letting others know about how you see the world; the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful.

We make up stories thoughout the day, some of us spinning truth with a little fiction, others of us with more fiction and a dash of truth, but the overall goal is the same with wanting the listener to share in what you have to tell, whether for a momen, an hour, a day, or a lifetime.

How incredibly wonderful and precious it is for us as humans to have such a device at our disposal. Every story we tell, even if just for a good scare, or to invoke a "gee whiz, that was lame" connects us humans with its common ground language that we are blessed to be able to interpret together.

"Dad, can you tell me a story."
"I always do son, I always do."

Volunteering at Indy Pride

Gary and I volunteered at Indy Pride today, doing a shift at the SGI-USA (a gay-friendly Buddhist organization) booth and also a shift at the Indiana Youth Group (the only state-wide organization focused on supporting LGBTQ youth) booth. We did the last shift there at IYG, so we helped tear down afterwards.

Large events like this pose some challenges for me:

I have some mild face-blindness (Thank you Oliver Sacks for my now having a name for what I thought was just me -- Prosopagnosia)  so people often will recognize me but I will have to embarrassingly ask "Who are you?"

My spatial-directional sense is frequently crappy, so I often get disoriented, having to repeatedly hunt for the same booth.

I dislike crowds and the nature of this event means a large crowd is a good thing.

And lastly I'm not a very social person (which shouldn't be taken for anti-social, which is a completely different thing (I hope)).

But nevertheless, I feel compelled to attend the event, work the event, and otherwise show my pride through action. For pride is not something static, but a way of conduct as a whole. As Aristotle put it, it is the "crown of the virtues" and rightly so. The Christian idea of it being a sin wrongly conflates it with arrogance, when really it is better understood as sister to worth.

For we should all feel a value in ourselves that allows us to be ourselves. As one of the T-shirts at the event proclaimed: Be Who You Are.

A high school boy came over to the IYG booth. He said he was so glad there was an organization like IYG and he's trying to get the word out to his friends about it. For a lot of them are gay, but the school they attend is private and the kids are forced to be closeted. He is trying to start a related group at his school, but he has to be discreet and call it something else, for in the administration's eyes the kids have no fundamental right to be who they are.

Pride is wanting to reclaim ourselves from those who would try to tell us we must be molded into their image. Pride is developing the ability to correctly point out to any number of arrogant fucks that it is they who have no fundamental right to tell us who we are.

Pride in the current age has to be more than: I'm here, I'm queer, get used  to it.

It needs to be: You see, I'm me, and frankly I don't have time for you to get used to it, so you better get out of my way. I am here, I am queer and I am here to stay.

Quest for What

My husband impresses the hell out of me.

A political scientist and social activist, he writes an informed blog and puts the constant in constant reader. He delves deep into issues and you can be assured his opinions are backed by much critical thinking. He doesn't rely on the nonsensical, half-baked crap that passes for analysis on Sean Hannity and the like but instead reads Court Opinions, Legislative Bills, and analyses by accredited experts and actual scholars in the field.
 
To give an example of the kind of reading he does, he is three-fourths through Hannah Arendt's Origin of Totalitarianism, a massive three-volume academic work. If you are unfamiliar with Arendt, imagine a particularly erudite work with a ton of footnotes. Then triple the number of footnotes.

I, on the other hand, have really dropped the academic ball since graduating with distinction in philosophy. Oh, I've thought about different philosophical issues, and those issues are still important to me -- but I haven't made the concentrated effort in my field like he has to advance my knowledge of such things.

There are several reasons for this, none of them good; although probably a good chunk of them rest on the shoulders of depression and feeling overwhelmed, stupid, and drenched in a sense of meaninglessness.

I have an inkling of the kind of questions I am asking, but there is so much nothing out there that it is hard to even know where to begin to find the answers. Compounding and confounding things are the dead-ends you are bound to find. For you won't necessarily know a particular author is full of crap until you understand his or her crap. Or it may be the case that the author is not so much full of crap, but it turns out that the questions he or she is answering is not what you were looking for after all.

In other words, if you really want to "solve" philosophical "problems,"  it requires a lot of time and effort, both of which are in limited supply. So it can be a challenge to even know where to begin, encouraging a constant ever-present real fear of your efforts being "wasted".

But on the other hand, time and effort will be "wasted" just as quickly standing still. So I reckon I should try to pick myself up and travel a little further down the road before I die. So I'm bookmarking sites like PhilPapers and checking out possibly illuminating library books. I'm working on wrapping my mind around what it is I'm trying to answer.

Still, there is that nagging voice screaming in my head "Dead-end, dead end." So I'm also working on responding to it with "but maybe, just maybe, it's not."

And maybe even adding something a little stronger: "And if it is a dead-end, so what?"

Chanting and Cursing

Yesterday I smashed our car.

Oh, it could have been when I was having one my bottled-up, rage-filled moments, which seem to be occurring more frequently of late as I try to cope with all the crap happening to us right now. I'm in the red of stress a lot of the time with my jumble of nerves pulled tight.

Despite the above, I generally do try to be a "defensive" driver; however, I do have my episodes where the other drivers are like vermin and I wish I had a box of D-Con with a car-to-car delivery mechanism.

So the accident could easily have been because of maybe a little too much aggressive driving or driving a little too fast or taking a curve a little too sharp. Or it could have been because of righteously zipping through that just-turned-red-but-should-have-been-yellow-longer light. Or it could have been because of my using our car to show a stupid asshole driver the error of his ways.

But no, it was none of those things.

It was just plain old fashioned stupidity involving myself and a stationary object.

I was maneuvering around the parking lot at Healthnet Southwest Health and Dental Center looking for a space. I parked in what looked like a space, but after getting out I decided it wasn't suitable because of the way my Mazda 5 stuck out. I decided I should go back to the edge of the far lot where it turns gravel and then into grass and some people were making their own spaces as they may in that limbo area.

As I backed out of that non-space, I started to turn my car so I could go in that proposed direction. But there were three cars in line already coming towards me from there. This is significant, because anyone who knows the lot I'm talking about knows the path to it is a two-way but one lane stretch. So I'd have to at the very least wait until the three cars cleared out before I could progress.

So I got the bright idea, and it actually would have been a bright idea if I hadn't also gotten a bout of stupid, to just park in the street. The street's not that far away.

And besides, I'd have to move anyway so those other three cars could clear out.

So I switched my reverse turn so I could be poised to head out into the street instead. I was watching the end car, a pickup, in a nearby row of parked cars, worried I was going to hit it as I backed up due to the tight confines of the lot.

I didn't hit it.

No, instead I hit a great big pole that was also planted at the end of the row. Or rather, not the pole, but the wide cement encasement around the pole, no doubt placed there to protect it from stupid people like me. And when I say hit, I mean HIT with sound effects.

I smashed in the driver's side rear corner of our beautiful car.

Fortunately it is still drivable and the hatch still opens and closes. It still should probably be fixed, but with money being the none that it is right now, drivable means it will have to wait.

Poor car.

So what's that have to do with Chanting and Cursing? I appreciate the indulgence of you reading this far, as I am getting to that. And if you aren't reading this far, to hell with you.

Anyway, so today I went to the Post Office and then to the store. And of course it was raining, which didn't put me in the best of moods to tackle those chores. Usually I deal with my less than best of moods by yelling at the vermin drivers, cursing at them, gesturing at them, and asking rhetorical questions to them, like:

Are you waiting for permission, or what?

You know it's not going to get any greener, don't you?

What the fuck are you waiting for?

I could go on here with commands to the other drivers as well, as I have a whole barrage of on the fly driving chatter, largely peppered with expletives. I sometimes include the weather, the road, and the world in such invectives, being the equal opportunity curser that I am.

But today, starting with my initial getting into the car and starting to curse the weather, I chanted instead: Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

Literally in a forced change of wordage: Goddam fucking wea-Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (NMRK).

I chanted NMRK all the way to the post office. I treated the clerk with respect and she treated me likewise. I chanted to the store as well. Oh, I had my moments along the way where I started to let a Fuck or Asshole out, but I caught myself and said NMRK even louder, trying to keep my mind from falling into the negative space that draws me.

I should say right now, I'm not much of a religious person.

There's just too much evil in the world that's been committed in the dogmatic name of God, Ideology or Faith for me to generally have a high opinion of such things. I also can't just believe something as my naturally philosophically critical circuits aren't wired that way. Some religions I can appreciate more than others, but belief itself is more my husband's bailiwick.

Rituals in general seem more geared towards promoting the self-proclaimed elite rather than promoting the humanity of humanity.

I'm Buddhist more by marriage than by firm conviction, though Buddhism is one of the appreciated religions I mentioned above. A lot of the basic ideas and values of it make sense to me; more so than, say, a cross, seventy-two virgins, or circumcision. But the chanting -- praying -- of it is difficult for me take with the seriousness that the truly devout -- like my husband -- do.

Still, I'm of a somewhat pragmatic bent. So chanting in the car is one of the ways I'm trying to improve the way I handle stress, anger, frustration, and life sucking more than I would prefer. For we all know that familiar Einstein quote that is easy to remember but difficult to put into practice:

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is insanity.

Cursing sure as shit hasn't done me much good. I'm generally as angry after the curse as before it. So why the hell do I do it? Damned if I know.  But I'm trying like a motherfucker to change that god-awful habit of mine.

Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

Not Green but Red

It's St Patrick's Day. March 17. That's what my calendar tells me.

It also tells me it's 2012. 2012? Really? You could have fooled me.

We have long since passed the millennium, yet my husband Gary and I keep fighting the same battle for equality. I'm sure some people get tired of me writing/ranting/speaking about anti-gay stuff; but try to imagine how tired we get of living it.

The latest attack by the people elected to serve us was on kids. The only gay youth group in Indiana finally got approval for a specialty plate. They were selling well. Then, at the eleventh hour of their session, our state government, having failed to be able to legislate it away, pressured the BMV to pull the plate for reasons that are specious at best.

Gary has written a blog about it, along with the senators involved, which you can link to here. Politics is more his area than mine and he does a better job of that type of explication/exposure/fact-checking.

My educational background is in philosophy and I articulate it via my fiction. I write stories that I hope will entertain as well as subtly stimulate some new thoughts or reconsiderations of old thoughts in at least some of those entertained people.

Subtlety is one of the reasons I prefer fiction. Oh, I do have a definite moral vision in mind when I write as well as a philosophical space from which I am coming. But I try to keep my focus on describing the "real" fiction events in a "this is what happened" way that hopefully leaves it up to the reader to draw their own conclusions about the good, the bad, and the ugly.

For I firmly believe it is up to people to decide such things for themselves.

But the state of our state forces me to be more direct.

Lawmakers practice deceit, so I must be an outspoken champion of honesty to counter it.  Hate groups spread lies so I must be an outspoken bringer of truth to expose it. Unholy religious leaders subvert faith to warp kids' minds so I must be an outspoken evangelist of what's sacred.

For how are people free to decide for themselves when the triumvirate above alone crowds their ears and eyes with the white noise of their malevolence?

It makes me so angry I see red. And it makes me want to cut through that red into a greener world. I want my words to rain down on my -- our -- world so full of beautiful potential and leave in its aftermath a vibrant rainbow for anyone -- and everyone -- to see.

Repurposing

Due to (lack of) funds, I have been repurposing a lot of things lately, such as: An empty Tidycats litter tub is now a kitchen wastebasket and an empty coffee container is now a sugar canister.

Something I've been thinking about a lot, way before the above two examples above, is how we often think of things in static form; we slap a noun on it and it enters some relatively inviolable state of being -- like chair or soul -- until it is no more. But thing X is really only X when we conceive it as X. This isn't to say it stops being X when our focus is elsewhere, but to realize it never "was" an X in the being sense that non-being would imply.

X and not-X are categories of conceptual convenience rather than metaphysical constants.

Philosophical Consideration of a Cat’s Mouth

Our cat, Christopher, sometimes bites. He bites when he is mad, when is playing, and when he is happy. Often there is no warning, much to my husband’s chagrin. Christopher will be purring contentedly on my husband’s lap, then suddenly chomp down on the hand that is petting him. Not done with malice, but it hurts regardless, leading to all kinds of familial commotion.

Sometimes, of course, I instigate such things. I mess with him, offering my own hand as a tempting target, then pulling it away so his mouth closes on empty air. He enjoys playing this game for a while, but then usually ends up biting a conciliatory object, which is more often than not a body part of my poor caught-in-the-crossfire husband.

Christopher recently placed a paw on my arm, wanting my attention. I was mulling over Merleau-Ponty and other progressive thinkers I read in the philosophy of mind course I took last spring. Our body is more than an instrument our mind uses to accomplish its goals. For the creation of the goals themselves come out of the way the body is constructed. We reach out into the world as our bodies allow. Towards such ends, our fingers seem key, as we not only grasp objects, but our individual digits differentiate so many things at once. At our fingertips is more than a trite phrase, but rather an expression of accessing the world and making it intelligible.

A cat’s paw, though it has five digits, doesn’t allow for human-like dexterity. It can swat things and flex and claw, but it doesn’t seem to allow for complex input by simply touching. It doesn’t glide its paw over objects to assess them. Christopher doesn’t seem to be aware of his paw beyond its either touching something or not. His mouth on the other hand…

His mouth seems to be one of his most important gateways to the world. Where we test things by touching them with our fingers, he bites them. Like with the touches of our fingers, his bites surely have a variety of meanings that the contact imparts to him. Such thoughts do not quell the pain caused by a mouth full of sharp feline teeth. But still, I can’t help but think about his expressive body reaching out into the universe and the wondrous, if painful, response of my own expressive body meeting him halfway.