Everyone Needs a Little Gender Questioning
I finally got my copy of Essential Dykes to Watch Out For from Amazon. Everyone needs to read this. Ok, so maybe not everyone thinks so, but I do. Alison Bechdel rules!
I decided to skip my first class today. First off, the theoretical subjects we were covering held no interest to me. The theorists are Bellah and someone else I can’t place the finger of my memory on right now. Anyway, they’re moralists who think that the United States is in a moral crisis (of course by their standards – Judeo-Christian, middle-class, white, male) and that we should all turn back the clock (ok, so not that literal) and go back to the 1950s when Mom stayed in at home in the kitchen and raised the kids and didn’t get any days off or help with the housework, and Dad would go out to work. They want the time when the country wasn’t ruled by an elite few who hobnobbed with each other and decided what was going to be the rules. Yeah, like that didn’t happen back then.
Anyway, as you can probably tell I wasn’t at all interested and the fact that I had the edges of a headache (I could feel the edges of it around my sinuses) and had reading and note writing for my other class today.
I also called in sick. I didn’t want to go in. This is my first time of doing that…I’ve only had one other sick day and it was a partial day. Instead I went shopping for dress clothes.
Why did I go shopping for dress clothes, you ask? Well you might do so. It turns out that tomorrow I’m going to a kind of “open house” thing at a hotel to do with Parole and other things. I needed something that was (to quote my supervisor) “more than casual”. So I did. I got two pairs of black pants, one more formal than the other, two bras (yeah, bras & me, weird, huh?), three midi-shirts (they’re gorgeous and were on very, very, very steep sale) and a midi-sweater (to go with the midi-shirt that I’m going to wear with my new pants tomorrow. Oh, I also got a pair of pantyhose because I can’t go barefoot in my shoes.
This all means that I should look right nice tomorrow. I was going to study tomorrow but the shift I’m working (1 to 9) precludes anything productive other than showering and making sure that I’m reasonably tidy.
The class I did go to was interesting. There are some things that are going on internally that I’m finding somewhat discomfiting. While I read the chapters and the peer reviewed articles I’m finding that I’m becoming less colonialized. My attitudes about how things are, or should be, have shifted enormously. In reading one of the chapters about land, being a band member (of a reserve, not a musical combo) and having a link to a place and ancestry, I’m losing that for myself.
I don’t have a “land” to call my own. I don’t have an ancestry that links to a place that has meaning to me. I can’t say its France since my family has been away from there for over 300 years. I can’t say it’s the coast of Quebec since I know, and have known, little of that area and family as well. The same is true for my mother’s side of the family with her mother’s coming from Russia, but being German, not Russian. Even they’re displaced and not belonging to an area. As to her father’s side, who knows? All I know is that he came from the USA. Otherwise I know nothing of his family. I have no place of “land” belonging. Bran does. He has a place in Scotland that shares his surname. It’s his ancestral lands, the home of his clan. Thanks to Bran, Boy has that as well.
It’s an interesting process, but it is very difficult at the same time. I don’t think of myself or the world in the same way. I don’t have the link to the ancestral lands because that was severed long ago by the forgetfulness of those who came before me. I don’t even have an ethnic heritage to cling to because there were no ethnic traditions passed down to me. Anything I might try to lay claim to would feel odd, foreign and fit like a too-tight pair of pants. Right now I don’t belong anywhere. Being un-rooted is very odd and kind of painful.
So that’s what I was thinking and discussing today. Heavy shit.