In the mid-city, under an oiled sky,
I lay in a garden of such dusky green
It seemed the dregs of the imagination.
Hedged round by elegant spears of iron fence
My face became a moon to absent suns.
A low heat beat upon my reading face;
There rose no roses in that gritty place
But blue-gray lilacs hung their tassels out.
Hard zinnias and ugly marigolds
And one sweet statue of a child stood by.
-from “a garden in Chicago”, by karl Shapiro
back when i was in my early twenties, i had blue hair. i had green hair, i had purple striped hair, i had white hair. i put holes in my nose and my lip. i wore a crew cut. i had visible tattoos (back when few people did). i wore combat boots.
i did all those things as a way of visibly setting myself apart. i wanted to be separate, unique, different. but more than anything, i wanted to rebel. i wanted people to know just by looking at me, that i was not someone to be trifled with. that i had my set of strong, outspoken opinions and that i didn’t give a shit about theirs.
i rebelled in other way too. i dropped out of university. i moved to new york and i moved to an unsavoury part of town. i took up smoking. i got engaged at 19. whatever was expected of me, i set out to do the exact opposite of. i did daring and sometimes unsafe things. i didn’t want to be confined, easily pinned or compartmentalised. being a “rebel” was absolutely central to the way i identified myself at the time, and i didn’t want the expectations of others to dictate my life. perhaps i wouldn’t have put it in so many words – in fact, if you’d told me i was doing those things specifically as acts of rebellion, i would have told you to fuck off. (after all, i would not be so easily categorised!) but i did those things as a decidedly deliberate way of asserting my freedom, my adulthood, my life.
ha! i was so very terribly conventional in my enthusiastic attempts to be unconventional.
needless to say, as i approach my forties, i no longer do those kinds of things – or if i do, i do them for very different reasons. in fact, if you ask me to identify myself today, i would probably say that i’m a woman, runner, expat, liberal, friend, advocate, (maybe even wife, although i rarely use that term out loud or in my own thoughts). my 20-something resolute conviction of self as rebel doesn’t even enter the picture.
how is it that something once so essential to how i felt and thought about myself, so easily slipped away? and what’s more: why don’t i miss it?
the thing that i understand now in hindsight, is how very intertwined my acts of rebellion and identity were. where i previously had no well-formed identity, i believed you *had* to rebel in order to establish yourself in the world, stake your claim on adulthood. that you had to show you could think and act for yourself by casting off all you’d previously been taught. as you get older, of course, you realise that the thing about rebellion, the reason it is overwhelmingly the domain of the young, is because defining one’s self in opposition to, or in defiance of something, takes so much focus and energy. to rail against the rules takes a lot of anger. and i found (and would guess that most people also find) that as my world got broader with age and experience, those things were in much shorter supply. once you travel a bit, try different careers, try different relationships, try different personas…the perspective from which you view the world, and your context in it, inevitably shifts. of course, when you’re young, you don’t believe that it will, but it does – sometimes in radical and unpredictable ways. it becomes harder to maintain a well-honed ire. but what becomes clearer and clearer to me with each passing year is this: there are so many worthwhile pursuits and people, and our time is so fleeting – you begin to weigh up the cost/benefit ratio before even engaging. is it really worth it to me to get wound up? is this something deserving of my anger? and do i want to spend any more of my life being angry than is absolutely necessary? because rebellion without anger is just posturing – if you’re going to truly rebel, you have to invest something of yourself. there are so many things to be angry about in this world, that you could spend all your days ranting and raving. but is being consumed by that kind of anger every day, any way to live? quite frankly, as i continue to learn and understand more about the world, that investment in anger just doesn’t seem like it gets such a great return.
along those same lines, the other thing you learn as you age is just how much people are all – *we* are all – so much more alike than we are different. that person whose personal politics are 180 degrees from your own? in your twenties, that person represents everything you detest. that person is the straw man for any and all of societies failings. that person is someone you strive to be the exact opposite of. but as you meet more people from all walks of life, with views and beliefs that don’t jibe with your own, a curious softening happens. you discuss, you debate, you defend… and it slowly, insidiously begins to dawn on you that more often than not, they want to achieve the same ends as you… they just have very different opinions as to how to go about it. the wider range of people you encounter, and the more conversations you have with individuals that challenge the facile stereotypes, the harder it becomes to revile them. how do you rebel against someone and something you know so well? being able to see and understand all facets of the argument not only makes you more informed, well rounded person – it makes it harder to take sides. if rebelling is charging left in a right leaning world, what do you rebel against when you find youself drifting towards the middle?
and while youth and inexperience accounted for so much, there’s something else that characterised that time in my life: a deliberate obstinance. the headstrong decisions to do things i knew probably weren’t good for me, even as i chose to ignore my own better judgment. that need to prove that i could handle whatever happened, even when the difficult situations i found myself in were ones of my own making. the freedom to make poor choices may be a right of adulthood, but in that heady freedom got lost the responsibility to decide well. so many of those choices were foolhardy, in retrospect – i can acknowledge that now, without losing face. because through those mistakes i’ve come to realise that making decisions from a place of defiance is not always the best idea. rebellion and wisdom often work at cross purposes, so the impulse to zig where i should have zagged wasn’t about proving i was mature – it was the equivalent of stomping my feet. it was only as the wisdom and consequences of those bad decisions sank in, that i realised that testing one’s freedom to fuck up, by deciding to fuck up, isn’t the most advisable course of action.
and finally, i’m also a lot gentler on *myself* as i’m older. i don’t need to be so harsh, to maintain such stringent adherence to one party line or another. i can encompass a whole multitude of contradictory things and still maintain my core beliefs. as i’ve grown and learned more about who i am, i no longer need to define myself so narrowly – or even at all. i am a woman, expat, runner, feminist, even wife – and if you ask me, those might be the words i’d use. but my truer self would say that i don’t need the security of well-worn labels. i don’t feel the need to tell people i am those things, because none of those things are who i am. they are only partial, contextual descriptors, at best – they are limiting. there is more to me than any one label, and now that i am more secure in myself, i no longer need that “rebel” tag that i used to wear so proudly. because as much as i wore that label, it also wore me.
in the end, my rebellion, like that of so many others, spoke most directly of an insecurity within. the outward crutch of someone who was trying too hard to find herself by identifying what she was not. and in discovering myself, however belatedly, finding i no longer needed to go to such great lengths. that angry, defiant, young woman, who wanted so badly to be her own person, finally is.
as it turns out, she’s not so angry, not so defiant… and not so young.
Rebellion (Lies) – Arcade Fire
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i just woke to this terribly sad news.
i have always been so proud of the things ted kennedy stood for and fought for over his career. i have always been so fiercely proud to call him my senator.
the world has lost a truly great humanitarian, one of the last great liberals. he made me proud to be a liberal.
i hope that we can continue to carry on his legacy, and succeed in his last great quest: universal healthcare.
this weekend has been decidedly autumnal… despite the fact that we’re not even out of august, there is a noticable chill in the morning air. all a reminder of how incredibly fleeting summer is here on this grey island.
i’ve been playing around with the blog this weekend, and you may see a few changes. one of which is that i’m finally going to host my own music, for however long my bandwidth holds out. my “rotation” featured playlists will eventually be back once i get around to recreating them – there was no real clamour when they quietly went dead (the free host deleted my files) but i like to imagine that people gave them a listen every now and again. or at least, i enjoyed creating them.
so to stave off the lament over the change of season, and inaugurate the new music subdomain: a new playlist.
fun and bouncy songs for a sad summer’s end.
golden age – tv on the radio
turn cold – cut off your hands
sunshowers – m.i.a.
no sunlight – death cab for cutie
feet on grass – future clouds and radar
dog days are over – florence and the machine
steal my sunshine – len
click below to play them all
MP3 playlist (M3U)
and here’s the 
feed for downloads in itunes or your other music manager of choice.
i watched caster semenya blow away the competition in the 800 metre world championships last night.
and then i watched the race commentators and the iaaf blow her personal dignity out of the water.
since bursting onto the scene last month, there has apparently been quiet speculation about semenya’s gender. last night that quiet speculation became widespread international rumourmongering that semenya was one of a growing number of known intersex or transgendered atheletes.
gender verification has been carried out in international sport since the 1930s. from its first crude beginnings, it has, fortunately become much more sophisticated (by comparison) – taking into account physiology, genetics, hormones and psychology. it has also become much more socially and politically sensitive – transgendered individuals are allowed to compete in their newly-identified gender after a period of two years, and intersex individuals are also allowed to compete.
what hasn’t apparently become more sophisticated or sensitive is the media. the fact that semenya has spent her whole life as a woman and identifies as a woman, has now been openly called into question, in cruel fashion – it seems as if reporters around the world now feel it is perfectly fair game to speculate on the state of this woman’s genitals. it’s perfectly okay to discuss in print whether or not this woman “qualifies” as a woman.
for better or for worse, we live in a world where the vast majority of people line up nicely on either side of (what we like to imagine as the neatly binary) “man” “woman” divide. by default, then, anyone who falls in between those two descriptive categories, is seen by society as unusual. that doesn’t, however, mean we should allow people to treat them like freak shows. and surely an organisation as familiar with this territory as the iaaf, could do much to pave the way in this area – rather than singling out those athletes people are whispering about behind their backs, why not establish baseline regulation and guidance for all athletes competing at an international level? determine people’s eligibility for competition before, rather than after? take measures to qualify all athletes, rather than just the gender-bending few? gender testing was initially done away with in the late 90s, specifically because it is invasive and provides no clear answers. so is that proposal an easy, cheap, or less controversial way to do it? of course not – but in the current climate, it’s the only *fair* one. after all, if you’re going to subject some people to humiliating and invasive screening, there’s no reason the same standards shouldn’t either be applied to all athletes across the board, or be ruled out entirely. i can’t see anyway around it: either you err on the side of qualifying all, or you decide you will qualify none. the iaaf said they wanted to deal with this matter “discreetly” – at which they failed spectacularly, with earth-shattering consequences for the woman in question. so rather than discriminatorily pulling a select few behind the curtain based on scepticism and nasty mutterings, they could seek to implement a proportional and sensitive framework for decision-making before the fact, that applies to all equally, and does away with the tabloid-type talk and treatment of those athletes that “aren’t pretty”, (as a bbc commentator so disgustingly described semenya).
otherwise, (and this is the question which must be answered), why do it at all? to strip those who don’t “qualify” as women/men of their achievements? it may seem crude and wildly impractical to suggest that all athletes undergo some kind of process before they compete, but how much more barbaric is it to publically strip-search those individuals like semenya? because that’s what this amounts to.
this is an issue which will only become more common – as it should. people of all genders and genetics must be allowed to compete in all arenas of athletics and daily life. we need to identify a way forward for dealing with identity which is not based on “outing” the exceptions to the rule.
last night caster semenya managed to put the rumour and sensationalism behind her… and just be sensational. it’s a shame the media couldn’t see past her gender, and view her for the true woman she showed herself to be.
i’ve mentioned here before numerous times that i spent a good part of the academic year 1990 – 1991 contemplating throwing myself out a high window. and while i would never, ever want anyone to experience those horrific depths of despair, the one positive thing that period in my life did do for me, was completely inure me to any fear of death. when you spend day in and day out thinking about death, and planning for death, and imagining what it would be like to die, death loses any sense of mystery or taboo. you feel as if you know it intimately, having slept cheek-by-jowl with it for so long. it takes on the much more pragmatic role of something you have to eventually get around to preparing for. like taxes. or at least, it did for me.
which is not to say, of course, that that means i have any idea what it’s like to actually die. i may, in fact, be piss-my-pants terrified when actually faced with impending death – i have no idea, and am not so presumptuous as to believe i could possibly predict my reaction. i’d like to believe i’ll be very calm and graceful and accepting when my time comes, but may very well, in fact, kick and scream and tantrum like a toddler who won’t let go of his toy.
we don’t talk about death much in either the anglo or american cultures, though. i know a few things about what people in my immediate family want for their arrangements after they die, but not a whole lot about what they think it is like to die. if they’re scared of death. most of us don’t talk about death precisely because we are scared of death. death being that greatest of unknowns, and we fear the unknown. we don’t like to look too closely at the boogeyman in the corner. consequently, i don’t know if many of my friends and family believe in an afterlife, or souls, or reincarnation, or just dust. me? i’m a duster. i think when you’re gone, poof, that’s it. i’d *like* to believe in the recycling of a universal life force… but in reality, i think it’s lights out, game over. which is kind of harsh i guess, but i just don’t think human life is in and of itself, terribly special or precious, or worthy of some kind of karmic preservation after death. i don’t think plants or ants or fish have some kind of heavenly arrangements – why would humans?
which for me, is all the more reason to make the most of our time here whilst we walk amongst the living. to try to take every moment we have available to us and make the most of it. to *live* goddamn it, and to live by no half-measures.
why bring up all of this? well because i fervently and outspokenly believe that every person has the right to control the manner of their death. there have been a few court cases in the news of late, which underscore this point – an australian quadriplegic recently won the right to starve himself to death, and a british woman won her case to have the assisted suicide law reviewed. unfortunately in these instances, neither of these cases is a clear victory: the caretakers of the australian man will simply not be prosecuted for obeying his wishes, while the british woman will find out if her husband will be prosecuted for accompanying her to a swiss right-to-die clinic. but they are important steps in fighting for a growing recognition that part of living well, is dying well.
we often have very little control over what happens to us in life – call it fate, or god’s will, or random chance. in reality, as much as we like to believe we steer our own course, there is only one thing that we can predict with absolute certainty: we will all die. we are all progressing towards that finite moment in time when we will cease to exist. and many of us will die without control over that last moment – it will come at an unexpected time or place not of our own choosing, and not of our own volition. it is only natural, only *human*, therefore, that those who are able to see their own death on the horizon, can and do choose to exert some control over that final event.
to bestow a person’s last moments as a living being on this earth with as much dignity and respect as we can muster…isn’t that the kind of honor everyone deserves?
and yet, we as a society, allow our own multitude of fears around infirmity, death and dying, to pervade our culture and be instituted in law. we tell people that it’s not okay to plan for death, to think about things like pulling the plug, to consider issues around quality of life and what makes it worth going on. it’s almost as if we fear that someone else’s decision that their life is no longer worth clinging to, somehow devalues our own. we fear going gentle into that good night, and so we fight, tooth and nail, to ensure that our rules and our medicine and our cultural beliefs rage, rage against the dying of the light.
but we do so, at the expense of other’s humanity. we do so at the expense of being humane. people are forced to endure unimaginable suffering, unable to exert their last bit of will. family forced to suffer along with them. because we are afraid to confront our own deaths, we are afraid to confront theirs – if we could, we could perhaps begin to imagine ourselves in their shoes, and empathise.
empathy takes courage – a courage it seems we just don’t have yet as a society. we look away from those who wish to die, who discard their last scraps of privacy and place themselves front and centre, demanding that we see. we look away and pretend that it won’t be us.
but it will. one day, it will. we will all surely die. we can only hope that as we prepare to draw our own last breaths, that we are shown the same reverence and kindness that we should have shown to others.
Yesterday, I sat down to write about Hillary Clinton. I wanted to write about how her recent stern retort in the Congo was interpreted as “losing it”. How the papers then went on and on attributing it to how she’d recently been “overshadowed” by Bill’s rescue mission in north korea . How if the situations were reversed, no one would ever dare ascribe what boils down to jealousy, to a man.
I sat down to write about it, and I couldn’t find the words. Couldn’t work up the requisite lather to expound on the media misogyny. It’s been happening a lot lately. A couple of people I know recently wrote impassioned blogs about the healthcare fiasco – blogs that got lots, and lots of comments and debate. And for a split second, I regretted not writing one of my own – but only for a split second. See, I know what kind of time and effort and energy goes into crafting a blog post like that. There’s research and reworking and balancing the right amount of emotion with facts. But mostly, you need a burning desire to engage the debate.
I’ve known for many years that it’s not possible to change people’s minds. That people’s beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies is such a truism that there’s a technical term for it: confirmation bias. People seek out information that confirms what they want to think, not information that contravenes it. If people want to believe that Obama is a foreign-born Muslim socialist Nazi, or that the 9/11 attacks were a government plot, or that man never landed on the moon, then no amount of objective information will change their mind. It’s like trying to argue with people who believe the world is flat. In fact, it can harden their resolve in their position, rather than weaken it. The more people invest in their beliefs, the more they have to lose if they’re threatened, and the harder they will fight to preserve them.
In short? Head, meet brick wall.
So when I rant about something political, I don’t actually believe I’m influencing anyone who doesn’t want to. When I’m ranting, it’s because I’m angry and venting, not because I think I might convert anyone from the other side. I have, however, previously always been happy to engage the debate. Pointedly so. Vociferously so.
And now… I’m just not. I’m tired or arguing just for argument’s sake. If it won’t make any difference in how people vote or think or behave, why bother? And I’m more than a little saddened by the extraordinary capacity for people to belief outrageously outlandish things, out of a desperate need to protect their own self interests at the expense of others. Arguing against stuff like that just seems like so much wasted breath lately. Wasted time and energy that could be put towards other things, rather than plugging away behind a computer hoping that if i just come up with just the right turn of phrase, my position will be so convincing that people will have to agree. Debating can be fun, but getting all worked up to debate well is soooo draining. More and more, I find myself letting the debate go – because life is too short to spend it throwing sand into the wind, and I’m getting too old to care much what other people think.
all the above? i sat down and wrote all that out yesterday morning. then yesterday evening, i read this, which is, on the face of it, about feminism, but the upshot of which is: you gotta represent. people don’t change their minds overnight, and maybe they sometimes don’t change them at all, but when they do, it’s because they hear about stuff and think about stuff said by people for whom it matters. people who are not an abstract hypothetical, and who are not an anonymous statistic, but people who hold their beliefs dear because they lie at the core of who they are and how they live their lives.
it’s given me a lot to chew on. do i, in some small way, influence people who might otherwise not be swayed? or is taking on the debate as futile and hopeless as it feels sometimes? does it invigorate me, or sap my energy? a few years ago, this wouldn’t even have been a question – am i just getting soft with age?
i know that in my real day-to-day personal life, i represent. so the question that i’ve been mulling since yesterday then, is: is this blog an extension of that? or does time spent debating here on the page take away from time spent *living my life*?
i’m not sure i know.
the lies they’re slanging around in the u.s. about healthcare, have now reached my shores. i said the other day that i wouldn’t dignify the absurdity with a response, but now people with absolutely *no* experience of what they’re talking about, are slagging off my nhs.
that’s right, my nhs. the system i have, in the past 6 years, come to regard as quite precious to me.
in case anyone stateside is looking for some truth, here it is:
in this country, we view basic healthcare is a *fundamental human right*. that means it is free at point of service to everyone, regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, weight, sexuality, pre-existing condition, income level, employment status, maternity status, mental status, or disability. that means when i go to the doctor, i never once have to take out my wallet. not once. that means i don’t have to worry about eligibility periods, or COBRA payments, or copays, or excluded conditions, or health savings funds, or coverage levels, or HMOs, or PPOs, or staying in-network, or annual deductibles, or employer contributions, or payment plans, or contract clauses, or invoices.
i simply go see my doctor, and they treat me.
it’s not perfect – in fact, far from it. but it’s still a damn sight better than any system currently in place in the u.s.
oh, and if i don’t like it? i can go private.
but don’t take my word for it. check out the facts for yourself here and here.
i’m tempted to say that if people are stupid enough to buy into the lies and fearmongering, they’ll get the system they deserve… but they won’t. because what everyone actually deserves is universal healthcare.
when i was back in boston a few weeks ago, i spent a couple days hanging out at my brother’s house. my brother has one of those giant fuck-off plasma screen televisions, and every available cable channel known to man. and as i spent some time one morning flicking through news station after news station, with screaming headlines in primary colours and slick plastic talking heads, i was overwhelmed with a single reflexive reaction: revulsion.
and so i turned it off, and walked away. probably one of the only times i ever have.
confusing too, given my former status as a political junkie, but i seem to have lost my appetite for it. i’ve known, intellectually, how the politrix of media plays out – the mass marketing of fear and hype, preying upon the simple desires of the public to have complex, grey issues distilled down into an easily digestible message. but for the first time, instead of railing against it, i’m content to walk away.
i’m not interested in playing out my part in the artificial drama any more. i’m not willing to allow myself to be worked up into a frenzy, or polarised, or take up arms for my side. because even battering against the facile stereotypes and misinformation, feels like playing into their hands.
these well-worn tropes only work when they can define themselves in opposition to something. when people act in defiance against something. more and more, it seems to me that the intentional devisiveness taking place in america only serves to undermine *everyone’s* best interests.
and so while i read the ridiculous headlines about “death panels” and socialism (as if!) and nazis in relation to the healthcare debate, i no longer feel the need to weigh in. i’m happy to nod along with others, but the level of invective being slung around has reached absurd heights.
really? nazis? joker satire? over *healthcare*? it’s reductio ad absurdum spun out of control – it all seems like a preposterous joke, and i can’t relate in the least.
so if you’re wondering where my usual ire has been these days, with so much to rant and rage about, there’s your answer.
i just can’t. i can’t dignify this kind of rhetoric with a response.
which is a shame really. not for me – but for all those out there who invest immense amounts of time and energy is a war which cannot be won. because like all wargames, there is only a zero sum outcome in which we *all* lose out.
updated: just in case, like me, you need a bit of humour to see you through, check it: jon stewart v. town hall crazies and death panels
this is the problem: i am an inveterate muser, hopelessly mawkish, sappy and sentimental. a melancholy baby.
give me the right soundtrack and the right kind of afternoon-tinged sunlight, and i find myself tripping down that lane again. the endless lane of what ifs and what could-have-beens. the wonderings of who and what i left behind in my headlong, headstrong rush.
i rush ahead, for fear of being left behind. and so i crash forward full steam, all the while looking back. i make burn-bridges decisions, and then stand on the other shore, watching the flames and wondering why i’ve cut myself off from the mainland.
does everyone do this? think about people they used to know and people they used to be, and wonder just why the hell exactly they turned left instead of right?
and maybe everyone does it, but probably few do it with my special talent for wallowing in the heart-filled heartsickness of wishing. i revel in them, these waves of longing and ambivalence and memory. i take immense pleasure in the self-centred act of surrendering to the waves. allowing them to wash over me, drown me with their sweet sorrow. it’s the beauty of a really poignant song that reminds me of an affair that ended badly, but was oh so fun while it lasted. it’s the smell of late summer afternoons that brings me back to a place were i was once lonely, but which i filled with wine and poetry and hours of museums. it’s the flashback to a quiet walk in the fog with a good friend, who i did not then know i would never see again.
see? told you i was good at it.
i could turn it off, if i wanted to, i suppose. i sometimes suppose i should – it has the effect of stirring me to disenchantment. the present can never answer the questions of the past, or fulfill those old desires.
but there is a richness to those moments – holding pleasure and pain in the same instant can be exquisite. a complexity that brings each feeling to its fullest expression. a pairing of acidity with sun-ripened sweetness.
and so i wallow. i turn up the music, pour some more red, pore over old words, old photos. i let my eyes fill up, just because.
because life is beautiful and sad and full of songs and memories that can make you cry. because i am an inveterate muser, a melancholy baby.
much as i might dwell on what might have been, i wouldn’t have it any other way.
do you not yearn at all? – the acorn
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my friend andy is the lead singer in a band. through many, many months of dedicated practice, beer-fueled inspiration, perspiration, and dogged determination, they have managed to craft a full-length album. thirteen songs borne of their heads and hearts, committed to music and memory.
it’s kind of amazing when you stop and think about it. it takes a special mix of courage, passion and ego 
to create a piece of art and put it out there for the whole world to see. very few people ever see their dreams through that way. that’s an achievement anyone should be proud of.
oh…and it’s really damn good.
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