Mawwage. Maewage is what brings us togeva today.

First of all, I'm glad that same sex marriage is considered a federal civil right.

Apart from that, homosexuals still do not retain national civil rights equality. And America does not grant total marriage equality. In fact, the Supreme Court ruling contains a statement I find supremely troubling: "No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. "

Two people marrying for love, fidelity, family? Since when was the government charged with defining what marriage was? If I were a polygamist, I would find this ruling troubling. As I'm not, and I'm simply someone who sees legal marriage as an arrangement of finances and rights, this is still troubling. 

I got married with that in mind, my legal marriage was performed before the marriage ceremony. I'm in the process of undoing that legal commitment. The relationship is over and the two were never the same thing in my way of thinking. To hear that my federal government disagrees is... disenheartening. It suggests that my marriage was null and void from the moment of my husband's infidelity, which means that not only does the last year not count, but the last six do not. I don't think that's the government's right to dictate.
Yes, it's arguing semantics, but that's the entire purpose of the US Supreme Court. That's what they do. 

The spirit of the words, that homosexuals have the rights to marriage, I understand, but I worry that the wording was made specifically to limit marriage to two people. Why? What possible reason could anyone need for marriage rights to be limited to one person? That's a personal decision. If it's because they don't want people getting extra tax breaks, well, there's no limit on the amount of children a person can have. 

It's not enough. And it's a limiting decision. 

Of course I'm glad that all marriages will be recognised equally under federal law, I just wish the ruling had not gone further.

Things I'm Learning

I'm feeling particularly stupid lately.

I've been turned down for part time, no degree jobs by every single library in the metro area.

I'm worried that possibly I've been paid all I'm going to be for the school job, which is half what I expected.

I wonder what I'm doing.  Here.  With my life.

I keep thinking, maybe in a year or so I can run.  I can quit all these obligations here and...  Do what?

I'm going to die unimportant.

Brain in a Jar

I've said before, I am not a physical person.  My dad used to take me out in the backyard to play catch.  He'd throw the ball at me and I'd invariably be unable to catch it.  A couple of times I got hit in the face with it.  I think the week after he hit me with the baseball, I insisted on the softball (on the grounds, that, well, what do you think my logic was)?  A softball hurts a hell of a lot more than a baseball, and I think that was the end of my throwing and catching skills.  I was probably 5.  Maybe 6.

I hated gym class, for various reasons, but the overall, lasting reason was that we were expected to do things without being taught.  The middle school gym teacher yelled at me for skating "wrong."  I never learned to skate properly, pushing off with both legs, I roller skate like I'm on a skateboard.  If I hadn't wanted to go to skating parties in elementary school (because it was the 90s, and everybody went to skating parties) I never would have learned.  I didn't learn to ride a bicycle until I was 10.

Other skills I was yelled at in middle school for not having included the ability to do a chin up, running a mile in less than ten minutes (though, really, that was sheer spite, I had no interest in running, I was perfectly happy to walk around the track the entire semester), jump rope, making a volleyball go over the net, and tinikling (which is some kind of Spanish hopscotch auto-de-fe).

There was no instruction.  For tinikling and jump rope, they'd bring in a couple of older kids to demonstrate and we were supposed to copy them.  That's as far as it went.  Except in middle school we were graded for our skills.  A combination of that and my refusal to consistently wear gym clothes meant that I got pretty much solid Ds in gym all through middle school.

In high school, gym was a little better.  They handed us bows and arrows and didn't teach us how to use them.  They also didn't yell.  Much.  They yelled in swimming, but we only had to take that one semseter.  I was a good swimmer, but there was no swimming done.  Diving.  Doing turns.  Neither of which I'd been taught in my lessons, and I had more swimming experience than any other kid who wasn't on the swim team.  But they yelled at us all equally.

I took gymnastics for years, at the end of which the list of things I couldn't do included a cartwheel, a head stand, or a handstand.  Or vault.  At all.  There was no yelling there, there was a lot of, "try it again," but I had no idea what I should be trying or doing differently.

Middle school introduced a new and more horrible thing- choreography.  I liked to sing, I liked to perform, and so, invariably, this lead to being forced to dance.  I couldn't learn the dances, and I definitely couldn't look anything less than stupid doing them.  I auditioned for musicals for years, suffering through the cold dance audition, watching the show choir kids around me.  What was the difference between us?

Then in high school.  Vocal and physical warm ups.  I love vocal warm ups.  I hate physical warm ups.  Yoga.  In high school, I was in the best shape of my life and physical warm ups and stretching left me worn out, sweating and furious, because there was no way we were ever going to do any more movement in rehearsal than in the damn warm ups.  These days, I understand the ritual, but I still hate physical warm ups.

In college, I was kicked out of a movement class and eventually changed my major emphasis because the professor told me I was not going to pass his class.  A combination of all those years of baggage and the resentment that this was a required class called Vocal Production, where we spent the first 6 weeks breathing and doing horrific physical exercises, of all things (I thought we were going to learn IPA).

This is what I bring to the world.

So I really hate it when I'm trying not to be this person, when I'm trying to find something I don't hate and be physical, and I get middle school all over again.

The girl teaching circus tonight had subbed in for the class I took before.  That was a bad day and did not go well.  It went even less than well when she looked at me like I was from Mars when I didn't know what a plank was or how to do one.  Well, fuck you, lady.  She did, at least, show me.  So I can do one now.

This time, she looked at me and I felt recognition flicker in her eyes.  "You didn't sign up for the whole session did you?"  No.  Just today.  The terror changed to relief.  "Well, warm up whatever you need to."

In that history up there, is there anything that might suggest I know how to warm up, or what to warm up?  When someone leads warm ups, I can barely follow along.

And then we revisit a whole bunch of the things I can't do- pull ups, hand stands, and each time, this girl teaching goes, "you can't do that?"  No, I fucking can't.  "That's as wide a straddle as you can do?"  Yes.  Fuck you for asking that way.  And apparently I also can't point my toes.  "There are exercises you can do at home with dance elastic."  With what?  "You didn't take dance?"  What part of you telling me how to point my toes maybe didn't clue you in that I didn't take dance?

This is why I don't do this stuff.  I don't need to be treated like I'm an idiot.  I have to live in a world surrounded by people who can't recite the plot of Hamlet and like to wear sandals and I'm not allowed to treat them like they should be nuked from orbit.

The lesson in all this, of course, is don't take another class with this girl, which isn't as easy as it sounds.  There are two of them and they swap schedules depending on sign ups.  But the difference is real, I've had two classes with this girl and walked out of both of them wanting to quit and never go back, and I've never had that from the other.  With the other girl, the first class made me feel that I was going to be hopeless and I was wasting my time, but after that, I didn't feel that again, at all.  So I know that's the difference.

It just makes me mad that there is a difference.  I run in to these people in all kinds of physical environments, choreographers, equestrians, gym teachers, people who don't really believe anyone who doesn't already know how to do it will ever be able to, and who want to treat those other people like crap because they aren't part of the culture.  I'm sorry my interest in something and subsequent lack of skills ruins the entire discipline for you.

Take Me For What I Am

A few summers ago, I spent a couple weeks with a bunch of people from out of state doing theatre in the rural Midwest, a foreign country to them.

We went to a museum where I noticed a person in a skirt that I assume was there with his boyfriend.  I put it down as cross dressing and didn't think much about it.  Doesn't really matter either way, and, more fairly, both of them were more or less ambiguously gendered, but I read both of them as biologically male.

In a discussion later, about how friendly people were and relatively tolerant of a bunch of theatre weirdos, the burly Californian said that he didn't think a man could walk down the street in a dress here and feel comfortable.

"Didn't you see the two guys at the museum?" I asked.
"What two guys?"
"The only other people there apart from us."
"That was a guy and a girl."
"I don't think so."
"....No.  You think?  She was a girl."
"Maybe that person is transitioning, or presenting female, but I think they were both biologically male.  It doesn't matter, but you didn't notice.  The difference is not wearing a dress, it’s the difference in the person wearing it.  You, big, burly Californian with a beard, are going to create a different situation in a dress than, say, short, fair haired cherub faced Utahan, would.  I don't think it matters what state you're in."

One of my refrains when I was a kid was that I wished I'd been born a boy.  I don't remember why until puberty when I really, really wished I was a boy and could avoid all these feminine mysteries.

I've never been feminine.  I think I've always been a girl, though.  Or I've gotten used to it.  At 12, I might have gladly switched.  Now, I don't care much for the flesh suit I live in, but it would feel strange to trade it for a different one.

It's why I hate the, "all women are beautiful," stuff.  No.  I think it's perfectly healthy to have a grip on my limitations, as well as to recognise I have no obligation to be beautiful.  I have an obligation to be who I am comfortable being.  I don't feel limited by my lack of desire to wear a bikini any more than being glad I don't have children.  That’s not what I want to do.

I guess those, "to have a bikini body, put a bikini on your body," things are intended for people who would wear one, but, and to say, "no, the but is in your mind, do what you want."  And what I want is to not wear one, or heels, or dresses, but I resent a little bit that femininity and being female are supposed to be the same thing,  as though I'm supposed to want any of those things inherently.

I think I've spent too much time in the last decade trying to pay attention to expectations that, now that I notice them, I think they'really supposed to apply to me, rather than to someone who has been absorbing exterior information about who they're supposed to be for years.