Prop 8, Religion, & Facebook

Over the past few days I've felt alternately incensed and hopeful in the wake of the Prop 8 Supreme Court case.  The ubiquitous media coverage has presented impassioned arguments by both opponents & proponents of lifting the ban on same-sex marriage in California.  I've heard religious leaders touting traditional values & claiming that same-sex marriage threatens to completely unravel the fabric of our society.  I've heard gay couples speak about having been given a right & then having it taken away, about having a legitimate union rendered illegitmate in the blink of an eye.  And I cannot dare to venture into the dark waters of the litany of benefits denied same-sex partners unless I clear my schedule and commit to weeping for the rest of the day. 

In the midst of the sadness & injustice, I was buoyed by the countless straight allies in my Facebook feed yesterday.  By and large, I find the entreaties to change your profile picture or repost an image or quote kind of ridiculous.  They are either no-brainers (Share if you have the best mom in the world!  Change your profile picture to a brown ribbon if you think colon cancer is the worst! Repost if you are against child abuse!), or they present a false dichotomy & attempt to scare or guilt you into making a choice ('Like" if you love jesus! Keep scrolling if you want to burn in hell for eternity! Share this picture of a limbless veteran if you support our troops! Don't share if you don't care about human suffering and are unpatriotic!)  But this one was different.  It didn't accost or needle you.  It simpy asked you to identify yourself as an advocate for equality for one day.  It was a small token of support, & a simple reminder that there are more allies out there than you might think.
     
Although I know we are headed in the right direction, I am frustrating with the slow-going nature of progress.  And frankly, I cannot believe that gay rights and marriage equality is even up for debate.  The combination of free speech and freedom of religion cannot justify a campaign to limit another person's rights.  You have the right to expound upon how horrible you believe gay marriage is & your church has the right to condemn it, but that does not give you the authority to make same-sex marraige illegal.  This isn't a measure that should be on a ballot.  It is ludicrous to vote on who another person is allowed to love and to marry.  Many of the people who oppose same-sex marriage are desperately parsing The Constitution & using semantical gymnastics to try to make their case. This is the epitome of obeying the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law.  Our forefathers did not anticipate every single goddamn issue that might arise.  And we've made corrections & adjustments along the way (Amendment 15: Black Suffrage; Amendment 19: Women's Suffrage).  Clearly, the spirit of the law has deep roots in equality and social justice. 

Obeying the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law is precisely why this non-issue has been ballooned into a cartoonish mega-issue.  People who interpret The Bible literally--to the letter--are the people who so vehemently oppose same-sex marriage, & homosexuality in general.  If you look at the vast majority of Christ's teachings, the over-arching theme is love, compassion, forgiveness, & genorosity.  None of those tenets are upheld when you actively seek to limit another person's freedom to love and marry.  If you adhere to the spirit of The Bible, you will be far more Christ-like than if you attempt to adhere to every single ambiguous & sometimes outright contradictory passage written. 

And why are Christians so selective with regards to the Bible passages they trumpet?  There is a lurid fixation on one tiny verse in Leviticus about homosexuality.  Meanwhile, another verse in the very same book clearly & harshly condemns the act of adultery.  "And the man that committeth adultery with (another) man's wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbor's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death" (Leviticus 20:10).  Yet Christian organized religion has not collectively expressed outrage over this "sin" & used its resources to limit the freedoms of adulterers. 
  
I've heard people who oppose same-sex marriage say that their stance does not mean that they fear or hate gay people.  In fact, many protest that they actually love their gay neighbor; they simply do not agree with who their gay neighbor loves.  My response to this is simple: you do not understand the definition of love.  Love is big and welcoming and warm and inclusive.  Love is unconditional and strives to learn and to understand and to accept, and then to love even bigger and better as a result.  Love does not impugn another person's freedoms.  Love does not pass judgment.  Love is not preoccupied with what consenting adults choose to do with their genitals.

Perhaps we should be less concerned with how we define marriage & more concerned with how we define love.  Because the patronizing christian version of loving thy gay neighbor (while simultaneously holding a firm belief that their "lifestyle" is sinful, AND while actively working to disallow a full & equal union with the person they love) isn't love at all.  It's not even tolerance.  It is bigotry masqueraging as faith, & I highly doubt that God is enjoying humans marginalizing other humans in his name. 

Music Without Music

I think we need a secular term for "blessings" sometimes.  Because that word is just a little too saccharine-Christian for my liking.  It's just that I'm becoming more closely acquainted with gratitude these days & I wish I had better catch-all word to call those things I'm grateful for.  In any case, I encountered many things that made my heart effervesce with gushy, gooey love today.


My physical therapist is one of the most positive and enthusiastic people I have ever met, & and middle school/ early high school Tracy would have likely found her overly perky and annoying.  But that poor little 13 to 17 year-old Trace was surrounded by the facade of enthusiasm-- ever-smiling peers involved in numerous sports & activites who were "dating" other extracurricularly over-extended peers, with none of them being terribly kind to the less beautiful, less gifted, & less charismatic classmates.  Thankfully my understandable confusion (which bred cynicism) toward the outgoing go-getters lifted later in life, & I am now able to identify when joy & enthusiasm are genuine.  This is most definitely the case with my therapist.  She is preposterously sweet and kind and generous.  Today, after the patient scheduled for the appointment after mine called to cancel, my therapist offered to work with me for an extra half hour.  I eagerly took her up on that offer & got some divine, knot-busting soft tissue work for my low-back and feet.  Throughout the visit she & I chatted like old friends, & when I told her about the strange gas leak from a mysterious left-on burner the day before & joked that someone might be trying to off me, she said, "Yeah right, like this adorable, friendly, fun girl here has any enemies."  And all of this just broke my heart into a million beautiful twinking shards of awe & gratitude.  That someone could be so very selfless & sweet, & that this extraordinary person could recognize similar qualities in myself.....well it just made me want to laugh and cry and dance & behave in any number of conflicting & lunatic-like ways.  And then, as so often happens with me, the intense gratitude and love I felt toward this person began to ripple outward-- to the family and friends who have seen me through very difficult times, to the menagerie of adorable animals who have graced my life, to complete strangers, to enemy-type people who, at some point, made my life a living hell, but who also made me the person I am today.  To my goddamn savior of a boyfriend who teaches me about patience and generosity and big-heartedness everyday.  Fuck, man.....it was intense. 

And of course every minute of life cannot swell like some orchestral climax.  But when you expereince a moment or a series of moments like this....it can make you tremble like a plucked harp for some time.  It can grant you temporary amnesia & some much needed respite from pain.      

Expanding

Today seems like kind of a bust, if I'm being honest. I slept til noon. My greatest accomplishment was driving to the credit union to deposit my unemployment check. That in and of itself is laughable because I have the option for direct deposit.  I have had some technical difficulties in making that happen, and somehow, despite having all the time in the world, I've been unable to summon the patience to remain on hold for upwards of an hour with the unemployment office to have the issue rectified.  For me, certain tasks elicit instant disdain & complete certainty that they will devolve into harrowing ordeals.  Most of these tasks involve talking to customer service representatives about my finances.  These severely disagreeable tasks are not totally isolated to finances, however, as anything involving paperwork & organization & the slightest bit of follow through strikes terror into my heart.  Which brings us to tomorrow.  I will be taking my little folder of tax papers to an accountant at the crack of noon.  Until this tax season, I've always consulted my mom with any problems I ran into & always asked her to double check my work.  This is highly embarrassing for a 32 year old to admit, I realise, & even more so because my taxes have always been the EZ variety.  But I have a paralysing fear of anything remotely mathematical.  The consequences of errors of arithmetic were relatively mild in high school, but the stakes have been raised considerably in adulthood.  I don't think I have the constitution for an audit.  There would likely be more math, and accountability, neither of which are my strong suits.  And this year is a bit more complicated because I lost my fulltime job a few months ago and needed to withdraw a substantial amount of cash from my 401K to pay my bills.  I am hoping that my accountant will know some radical jui jitsu tax move that will keep me from incurring a steep penalty.  We shall see.

My lovely boyfriend went to bed a few minutes ago.  Before he said goodnight, he remarked on how he is bothered by how filthy the back of the fish tank appears.  He was really inpsecting the grime & he vowed to get some sort of sponge on a stick thing to really get after it this weekend.  He and I certainly complement one another in perfect, bizarre, and hilarious ways.  He is so focused and goal-oriented, absolutely single-minded about the things he needs to do & the things he would like to do in his life.  He makes plans.  He takes small steps to accomplish a bigger goal.  The upkeep on a saltwater fishtank is nothing short of intensive.  It is an expensive and time-consuming hobby, but Dion is all in.  I adore observing the little ecosystem in action & have grown very fond of all the little fish & snails & urchins, but I don't think I would have ever had the fortitude to bring even this small dream to fruition.  I get so bogged down in big picture living that I am unable to see the small, everyday steps that eventually make big things happen. It all just seems so massive in scope, impossible in execution. 

I frequently get overwhelmed with all of the things I feel I am supposed to know, & would genuinely like to know--local, national, & world news & politics; countless books, music, film, comedians, plays etc.  Plus, there is the stuff I think I should already be well-versed in--history, art, science, & all the sub specialties therein.  Not to mention all the glorious plants I want to know the names of and be able to identify.  So many writers write gorgeous, intricate prose about regional flowers & greenery, & I feel like my own knowledge would be limited to evergreens and dandelions.  I just feel so knowledge-deficient sometimes, so terribly ignorant on so many topics that I wonder how I have the temerity to write anything. 

For the past couple weeks I have been trying to read this wonderful novel called "Flight Behavior".  It explores the habits and instincts and compulsions and mysteries of human behavior & of animal behavior.  It is rich, sumptuous writing with interesting, fully developed characters, & yet I find my mind wandering.....thinking of all the things I should already know or should learn soon, the things I should have already accomplished or had better accomplish immediately.  The irony is a little too on-the-nose for me.  My own hard-to-shake flight behavior of awe & overwhelm & insecurity that keeps me endlessly fleeing from the task at hand.  These small, manageable, & potentially engrossing and rewarding tasks could teach me lessons far more important than simply accumulating trivia in some cold warehouse in my brain.  How is it that most of us know, on some level, what is important in life, but we get lost in a wilderness of bullshit?  How can we keep that simple recognition at the forefront & filter out the extraneous nonsense that undermines our spirit & our dreams?  If you have any ideas, please send them my way.  Because I spend far too much time digging through rubble for treasure when I could just look up at the night sky and see stars sparkle like flipped coins.

   

 

Ill At Ease

A dark living room illuminated only by a laptop. The fish tank light has been off for over an hour now--an early bedtime for Benny, Nora, Eric, & Amadeus, as I usually make them keep me company until 1 or 2 in the morning. No television flashing, no iphone at my elbow ready to be consulted for a host of inane reasons. Just this.

I feel a strange detachment toward the world tonight, but I don't think it has anything to do with being less plugged-in than usual. If anything, limiting my contact with electronics helps me to plug into what's really going on inside me. The surreal otherness of the world around me may have something to do with not having stepped outside once today, & with only having had brief exchanges with humans that were limited to the phone before Dion got home from work. It just felt right to stay put today. The snow was swirling caustionary messages outside my window all day. My muscles were still screaming from having overdone it at the gym on Sunday, The house was still all clean from my frenzied housework yesterday. It seemed a perfect day for lounging and reading and dreaming. And I did these things, but felt removed from my own relaxation, somehow.

I feel I don't have the words for any of it right now. The fatigue in my body seems to have spread to my mind & spirit, but the heaviness is only unpleasant when I fight it. I almost feel like this all-consuming lethargy is protecting me from myself. It is intercepting anxieties with exhaustion so immense I cannot summon the strength to entertain my worries.

Or perhaps I'm just spinning the story in this direction because I'm sick to death of my days being at the mercy of my body's whims. No, I don't feel well at all. That's the truth, I guess. And I'm saddened by not having the physical or mental energy to tackle all the things I want to: writing several pages a day, working on jokes & regularly attending at least 1 open mic per week. But perhaps this isn't exactly the case either. I need to realize that I can carve out time for these things, but I have to do them in my own way with emphasis on self-care. I can go to an open mic and not drink. Ta-dah! It sounds impossible, but I think it would go a long way toward improving my health & making comedy viable on a consistent basis. I can write one page per day right after breakfast before I begin the litany of chores and errands that leave me exhausted and in pain.

I can work at my own pace & impose reasonable limits. I don't have to give things up. I just have to do things differently. I can work with ehlers-danlos. Fighting agasint it only exhausts and confounds. And now, I must sleep so that I might feel better tomorrow.