i am present present present only in this moment, this moment, this moment – this is the rhythm my feet sing out as they hit the ground, over and over. my legs, too short to stride, churn a simple beat. man has been running since the beginning of his existence, and i now tattoo the earth in the same elemental way. lungs fill and empty, synapses fire billions of small miracles as the trees rush past me. the change of season announces itself – there are chestnuts now spilling over in abundance as the leaves begin the cycle of decay, the dry burnt tang of them hanging in the air. it gets darker now, and the moon is a waxen balloon. waxing moon. waning trees. my body knows how to do this instinctively, no learning necessary, just the communication reflex travelling along nerves and sinew and muscle, guided by the brain stem. my thoughts get out of the way, and let the feet do their thing. i do not try to run, i simply do. and even as i subconsciously note the arrival of autumn, and the beginnings of death all around, my body has never been more alive and my awareness in each new second is only this:

i am present present present in this moment, this moment, this moment.

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so much to say about my holiday, and no time to say it tonight. if you’ve been following my twitter feed, you’ll know there are lots of stories to tell.

but in the meantime: it’s banned books week. fight censorship – check out the ala’s list of most frequently challenged and banned books. then donate here on behalf of free speech.

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barbara ellen gets it spot on when she says katie price is like other women who’ve been raped who are afraid they won’t be believed.

If even the revelation that she’d been raped couldn’t do it, one wonders if there is any situation that could lead to people feeling sympathy for Katie Price?

Or is the mood against her so far gone that a plane could fall out of the sky, right on top of her head, and there would still be members of the British media and public muttering: “Well, she deserved it, didn’t she? Publicity-seeking trollop. Look at how she treated Peter Andre!”

Something has to explain the bizarre attitude of some parts of the media regarding Price’s account of being assaulted. Always careful to toss in a caveat (”Anyone who’s been raped deserves sympathy”), too often this would segue into a (surely irrelevant?) diatribe about Price’s character and behaviour, followed by baiting over her refusal to involve the police. Irresponsible, if not downright suspicious, seemed to run the rationale.

Well, not really. If anything, with her fear of involving the police and the courts, Price was behaving like a typical rape victim.

Doesn’t this, the omnipresent culture of automatic disbelief around sexual assault, serve to highlight why Price, and many other victims of rape, are so loath to come forward? Indeed, doesn’t Price’s obvious lack of faith in the legal system mirror the torment of many other rape victims, ordinary women, who fear they have little chance of being believed?

the comments beneath the article only serve to illustrate the point: that we seem to think it’s perfectly acceptable to judge the veracity of a woman’s rape allegation based on her dress/comportment/interaction with the media.

it’s the same sort of disgusting stuff which gets dragged into the courts in an attempt to discredit the victim – a variation of the tired old chestnut of “she deserved it”. no wonder she doesn’t feel any desire to prosecute – the public is doing the defendant’s job for them by spit-roasting her at every turn.

the idea that her looks/attitudes/actions have anything to do with “context” in which we should judge her allegation is ridiculous. after all, where’s the “context” for the rapist and his crime?!

once again we focus on the woman, rather than the perpetrator. the anger and disdain is aimed squarely at her instead of the criminal, and we make judgements about her character and her status as a victim based on how likeable she is. somehow it’s her burden to prove to the public that she really was violated, and there’s more outrage about her status in the gossip mags than there is about the fact that there’s a rapist walking around out there.

millions of women do not report rapes to the police. nor do they have to (though i wish they would). they do not do so precisely because they are afraid of the kind of condemnation on full display for Katie Price. the court of public opinion on rape is so often crueler for the woman than the perpetrator. no one seems in the slightest bit bothered that the social environment all but ensures that Katie Price will not believed and that a criminal is possibly going free – they’re too busy reviling her because they don’t like the fact that she makes money by blatantly using her sexuality and from doing interviews with OK! magazine.

the vitriol is, quite frankly, repugnant and depressing. that women who are raped (whether famous, infamous, sexually explicit, or “nice”) still have to overcome the immediate knee-jerk cynicism and critique of their personality, dress, activities, drinking habits, etc. in order to be taken seriously is a gross failing of our society. until we conquer those prevailing attitudes, how can we expect a rape victim to take them on?

________________________________

PSA: off for another week of holiday, see you when i’m back

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after six and a half years living in London, i don’t really get homesick anymore. not for places anyway. and as for people… well, the awful truth is that you get used to the missing. that ache becomes a constant, uncomfortable but bearable background noise that you learn to live with out of necessity.

so it’s been a while since i choked up on the inevitable departure. i am always sad to leave again, of course, but dealing with that is the price of being an expat. so you deal – you prepare yourself, you suck it up, and you deal.

and so it caught me by surprise to find myself sobbing as i hugged my sister goodbye yesterday afternoon, crying as hard as if it were my first time tearing myself away. i don’t know why. maybe it was the fact that i will once again miss the birth of my newest niece or nephew, due in a few short weeks. maybe it was the fact that for the first time in five years, we were all together for my brother’s wedding, and it felt so good to be in the warm embrace of my whole family. maybe it was the changes in my grandfather, whose memory of me is fading so fast. maybe it was the time spent with old friends that know me so well that we can pick up where we last left off without missing a beat. maybe it was seeing my dad together with his sisters, and realising that the passing years are beginning to have the same effect on myself and my own siblings.

it was probably all of these things and more. these precious, precious things that only grow dearer with time – these stirring longings that no amount of travel or freedom can take the edge off of.

i always believed that more than six years as an expat would inure me to these nagging doubts and guilts. i always thought this choice would get easier, not harder.

but the tears belie the reality – i am missing more, and not less. and with each passing year, the tradeoffs i’ve made seem to pale in comparison to the things slipping past which i can never recapture.

i have, for the most part, become accustomed to the missing. but this fresh spate of tears serves to remind me that that’s not necessarily a good thing.

how i miss you – foo fighters

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I could write about September 11th, but I don’t want to.

what I want to write about instead, is the kind of day today might have been. a day without the memorial services and moments of silence. a day without the flags and yellow ribbon stickers and “support our troops” signs draped off overpasses. a day without the gloom and grey weather that matches the sombre mood. a day without two wars being fought in foreign lands, and a more nebulous war of ideologies.

I want to write of a day like September 10th 2001. an ordinary day, so unremarkable that i couldnt tell you where i was or what i did, never mind recount every vivid emotion and detail. a day unencumbered by grief and missing. I want to write of a time of peace and security that no longer exists, except in the memory of anyone over the age of 8.

I want to write of what once was, and what will never be again. a nation without scar, a day without fear.

I want to write it and have it be true.

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if you were meeting your mate for the first time today, would you fall in love with them all over again? i mean, of course you would love them – the accumulation of shared experience and emotion through the years creates the kind of bonds that are hard to untangle. but would you fall in love with them? you being the person you are now, they being the person they have become, but both different than you were, in large part because of each other?

i ask because i saw (500) days of summer the other day. at first i was worried it might be just another manic pixie dream girl movie. the kind where the woman (in this case, “summer”) exists just to be an irrepressibly bubbly and eccentric muse to the male. and yes, it has certain cutesy elements of that kind of movie, but not overly so. and then when i began getting into it, i started to think that maybe the theme of the movie was about summer’s need to live life on her own terms and the lessons that it teaches the man (in this case, “tom”) about pursuing dreams. which it partly is as well – but that’s not really the point either.

and what we find in the end (and actually, what we’ve really known all along – as the narrator warns us in the first frame, “this is not a love story”), is that this story of a woman and a man is a modern variation on an old classic: unrequited love. or perhaps, not completely unrequited – because as the movie unfolds, we can see how in another time and another place, summer and tom might have had a future. summer and tom have the same taste in music. summer and tom have a similar quirky sense of humour. summer and tom tick all the right boxes, and even with the narrator’s warning in the back of our head, it’s both easy to forget and hard to understand how they don’t end up together. because they don’t. i’m not giving anything away in telling you that. but in spite of the warning, we the audience find ourselves getting sucked into seeing what we want to see in the relationship, much the way tom does. we assume that there’s a happy ending waiting for us, and so we frame everything we see through that lens.

the problem is, that in spite of all outward indicators of compatibility and romance, summer’s not in love. she sees clearly what tom cannot: they are not meant to be. for whatever reason, it’s just not going to work out, and no amount of wishing will change that. it’s a scenario that’s so relatable – we’ve all been there before, wearing our hearts on our sleeve, and it turns us inside out with the ache of it. we get caught up in thinking about what might have happened in an alternate universe where the pieces all click into place, and instead willfully ignore the painful reality of the mashed edges.

but in the movie, as in real life, we eventually learn that it’s only by letting go of the fantasy of what might have been, that we can allow space for someone new. finding someone with whom the stars align in the right sort of way to be a better fit than we could have ever imagined. an opportunity we might have overlooked if we were still wallowing in the place where the broken off relationship left us. the right person, in the right place, at the right time, appearing before us, and which we can only see when we have the clarity of experience.

which brings me back to my original question. because i have to wonder if part of finding the person you connect with, is also finding the person you don’t? the ability to move past the things that didn’t work out in order to be open to the one that does? can you really appreciate someone’s strengths (and vulnerabilities) without the benefit of hindsight?

in the unique triumvirate of right person/right place/right time that creates the possibility for a lasting and happy relationship, aren’t right place and right time just as important, (or perhaps even more so), than right person? and if so, wouldn’t meeting your spouse at a different place and time change the outcome and your future? in a reconfigured landscape, would we still recognise the one we love?

the narrator of the movie tells us, “this is not a love story”. but you know, it kind of is. after all, when so many of the circumstances that lead you to the right person – the one who fits, the one with no mashed edges, the one who *loves you back* – are left to the vagaries of fate… how could it be anything else?

us – regina spektor

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PSA: i’m off for a few weeks of holiday, so will see y’all when i get back!

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so: oh my god. i just manually upgraded two wordpress installations in under 15 minutes. (if you run wordpress and haven’t already upgraded to 2.8.4, you need to do it now!)

back when i first started this blog, 5 and a half years ago, very few people had self-hosted wordpress installations. and really? i had no idea what i was doing. i knew from nothing about css or php or mysql. i couldn’t tell a php declaration from a hole in the wall. and every time you upgraded your wordpress installation, you had to do it all manually. so this here, is what i used to go through each and every time. it all *sounds* easy enough. but really, it was a bitch.

the quickest way to start learning css and php and mysql? when upgrading goes horribly wrong.

the blood! the sweat! the tears! oh, the tears.

and so through much trial and error, i would spend hours figuring out what had fucked up. where the files had become corrupted. how to restore from the backup database. etc., etc., etc. it was all very painful, and i began to associate upgrading with the kind of post-traumatic stress usually only seen in shell-shocked veterans. ah, those were the good old days.

praise jeezus, upgrading these days is practically a touch-button process if you have a standard installation. a few weeks ago my friend amity was having trouble upgrading her wordpress, and we managed to do it from a starbucks. it all seemed pretty blase to her, of course. she’s only ever experienced the modern-day wordpress.

but for people like me who, by necessity, learned the ins-and-outs of the wordpress – the admin configs, the template code, the calls and querys of “the loop”, the table indexes – it all seems pretty miraculous. so while i still sat down at the computer this morning with not a small amount of dread, my upgrading fear is truly gone. i had a cup of coffee, upgraded, and sat down to blog about it

hallelujah.

fear and convenience – thao and the get down, stay down

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