To which I call bullshit

You've probably already heard about the US hate-group styling itself "One Million Moms" (OMM, for this post). It's an off-shoot of the American Family Association (AFA) that pits Real Mothers against The Homosexualists.  They recently got upset that lesbians had invaded JC Penney. Known lesbian and JC Penney spokesperson, Ellen Degeneres, later laid the verbal smackdown on OMM on her show. She is badass in an adorable and non-confrontational way.

Lately, OMM have targetted the much-loved Archie comics because two of their male characters recently married and the comic featuring the wedding would be sold openly at Toys'R'Us. 

Apparently:

This is the last place a parent would expect to be confronted with questions from their children on topics that are too complicated for them to understand. Issues of this nature are being introduced too early and too soon, which is becoming extremely common and unnecessary.

At this point, I call bullshit. Children are certainly introduced to topics of sexuality at young ages. My younger cousins had "boyfriends" in pre-school. Any time my brother mentioned even talking to a girl in primary school, our father would grin and make teasing comments. Every goddamn fucking fairytale I heard as a child ended with the boy getting the girl. Is this not introducing "issues of this nature"?

Of course not, silly! We're talking about teh gayz, here. Exposing young children to overtly heterosexual narratives is so prevalent because all children are straight, right? We can't let them think being anything other than straight and cis-gendered is normal until they're old enough to decide that being straight and cis-gendered is exactly what they want to be!

The main problem that vexes the pro-queer community is that groups like OMM tend to focus the discussion on what I like to call "gay man buttsex". They hear the word "gay" and immediately think of scandalously immoral acts that take place in the dead of night in a back alley and no one brought a condom*. The entire discussion is drowned out by the very real fear that we want to expose children to sexual acts.


Well, no. Again, bullshit. We don't want to talk about sex. We want to talk about love. We want children to know that if you love someone, it doesn't matter what gender they are. It doesn't matter what they have on their outsides, it doesn't matter what they have on their insides. All that matters is that you love them.


Can we get love on a front page?



*If you like barebacking in dark alleys, more power to you!
 

Dramz

Are you following the the leadership "spill" on Twitter? Neither am I! I'm keeping thanks to the hacks I know on facebook.

Do you have any fucks left to give about the University of Sydney cutting funding to the University of Sydney Union, maybe promising to send some of the SSAF their way (if they feel like it), and just generally screwing all of their staff? I gotta say, I'm scraping the bottom of my barrel of fucks. Luckily, I have more barrels in the cellar. Just not enough to care about searching for links to post.

These are the two major issues happening in my general life sphere right now. They are considerably greater than students in year 12 who can't add fractions, but I have to interact with the students (albeit online) on a day-to-day basis, so they tend to annoy me more.

I have no direct influence over the leadership spill, so I'll wait until the next election. Shocking as it seems, I don't have the power to oust most of the University Senate, so there's very little I can do about staff cuts and USU funding. These things are happening, and it's all very upsetting, but they're happening. I feel I'm doing what I can, which is very little.


So yes, it's weird and it's awful and it's awkward and we might have heard enough about it and maybe we need a break from it but screw it. We'll never stop being angry.

The inconvenience of being a decent person

So I've been neglecting the blog recently, but something happened last night to spur me into posting, mostly because it's a really galling example of the extent to which people manage to convince themselves that they're so damn important.

Sara and I had gotten on a bus in search of dessert, part way along the trip this really distraught woman jumps on the bus telling the bus driver that she had left her bag on a previous bus. We were sitting about three quarters of the way down the back of the bus and I pick this all up in the space of about 10 seconds. I wasn't initially paying that much attention, she was quite loud, it was reasonably difficult to miss. So the bus driver, apparently being the decent sort, was attempting, I believe, to get in contact with someone back at base, trying to find this woman some help. She didn't appear to have a phone, keys or anything on her, it was all gone with the bag. I imagine most people would only go up to a bus driver asking for help like that if they really didn't have anything at all.

Anyway, cut to about 5-6 minutes later when the bus is still in the same place, woman still distraught and the bus driver is still trying to help. A bunch of strangers sitting right near us start bitching about the fact that the bus isn't moving. I, too, was a bit annoyed at the hold up, but what followed next more than shoved me to the side of the distraught woman and the bus driver. The whining got louder and louder and they started making suggestions anyone with mild observation skills would realise were useless. "She should file a report with the police" Uhuh, yep, definitely, because she totally has a way to contact the police when it appears she has no phone. Never mind that lost bags on buses have nothing to do with the police, it's a Sydney Buses matter. Well done, you're a fuckwit. "She should ring the police and get a lift home". Ignoring the lack of phone this time, let's consider the fact that she doesn't appear to have keys. What's she going to do when she gets there? Sleep on the doorstep along with the 10 year old boy who was with her? Seriously? You win the douchebag award, it comes with a free nozzle.

Then this charming group of strangers, united by the intense agony of sitting in a clean, comfortable air-conditioned bus start yelling up the front trying to find out what was wrong. What was wrong here was their inability to not behave like petulant children and fucking wait. They start whinging about how they should just get off the bus and get on another one, I (and probably quite a few other people) silently hope they do, to get some peace and quiet back. They half get up like they're making a stand or some shit, talk about oppression. One of them whinges about the bus not going anywhere and them having places to be, "then get off and walk" I shoot back. "I paid money," was the feeble reply. Because I'm sure you've made nothing but sound investments in your life and this bus trip was going to break the bank.

Anyway, a whole 12 minutes later, after much posturing and whining, the bus finally gets going. But not before the jerks finally work out that the woman left her bag on another bus and start implying that it must be filled with drugs. Stay classy, jerks. The jerks applaud, because you know they have such important places to be that helping this woman who really needed it was out of the question. I'm not a particularly empathetic person, I was irritated by the delay until I saw the reaction of these entitled pricks. The delay would have been much more pleasant if they'd just shut the fuck up instead of pretending like they were genuinely hard done by.

Sara and I finally made it to our destination, so we got off the bus, and I called a "thanks" to the bus driver, as much to thank him for his helping the woman as it was to piss off any jerks that were apparently doing it tough.

We were walking to the ATM when we passed two of the jerks, one of which had complained about "having places to be" considering what they were going to have for dinner. They had literally gotten off the bus, walked off in one direction, since changed their minds and turned around and still had no specific destination in mind. This is "having places to be". Because it wouldn't have been remotely possible for them to spend that agonising 12 minutes discussing what they might like to have for dinner, no they had to spend it whining.

I swear, this sort of stupidity and pack mentality is what starts wars. They refused to empathise, they had no genuine interest in knowing what was actually happening and they made things up about her which apparently made it okay to behave as though she was less than any of us and therefore not worthy of help. Occasionally I try to think better of the human race, and then you see shit like this, people all too willing to stomp all over others because of a sense of entitlement. If nothing else, I certainly learnt something valuable, and all in the space of 12 minutes.

Happy New Year! Have some sexism!

We’re six days into the new year and I haven’t posted a New Year’s blog yet. Must rectify!

A Note on Forgetting

Sometimes, I forget things. I’ll wake up of a morning, have breakfast and think, “Oh, I should take the rubbish out on my way downstairs,” and then forget. So I come home and continue to forget and go about the next few days remembering and then forgetting. At some point, I’ll open the door, step into the apartment and be welcomed by a distinctly unpleasant smell. Within moments, the rubbish will be sitting in the bin outside, and the windows in the apartment will be thrown open, and I hope that next time, I won’t forget.

There was something of an Incident in early November on facebook. Very few people probably noticed or heard about it, but it shook me. A cousin of mine had posted an innocuous question about a club, which I took upon myself to answer, having previously frequented said club. Another cousin (I have a lot of them) began to poke fun at the first, asking if she or her boyfriend were bi, or gay and did she know it was a gay club she was asking about? These jibes rubbed me the wrong way and I commented on them, stating the underlying feeling made me uncomfortable. The thread quickly turned heated. The second cousin leapt on the attack, questioning my understanding of the situation and chastising me for casting ‘judgement’. The first cousin’s boyfriend chimed in his support, and later threw his own harsh words my way, eventually revealing his disturbingly bigoted perspective. Within a day of the last comment, my cousin had deleted her first status, thereby extinguishing the entire thread.

As much as I would dearly love to tear down every word hurled at me over those few hours that is not the point of this post (the beauty of the internet means I can do that tomorrow!). This post is about forgetting, and my cousin’s actions are merely illustrative. Her deletion of the thread speaks to a desire to forget. More than that, it speaks to a desire to quash further argument from any of the commenters.

So now that we’ve apparently forgotten, what happens? Surely everything will go back to the way it was? Everyone has forgotten about it, so there won’t be any lasting effects. Right?

I cannot speak for anyone else involved, but I know that it hasn’t been quite so easy for me. My trust in several people has been severely diminished, I’ve lost a facebook friend (whether or not this is a bad thing remains to be seen), I am severely dispirited to be shown, once again, that I am related to bigots, and I am left with the feeling that, should I ever indulge in my ‘reasonable skeptic’ side in front of my cousins, I will be put-down and ridiculed until I stop talking (the last lesson, admittedly, has already been ingrained from twenty-three years’ worth of stomping on my voice; I’ve only very recently begun to get it back). Beyond the immediate, I will continue to feel this for a very long time. How am I to act when I next see these cousins? Do we acknowledge what happened, or will we casually avoid the topic? What happens if gay rights come up in conversation when we’re in the same room? Will I ever be able to trust them?

Like the forgotten rubbish sitting in my kitchen, this situation will start to smell. The question becomes: how long will we let it sit there? At what point does the smell become too great for us to bear? There are three choices now: sit and let the fetid stench grow, forever unacknowledged; get as far away as possible, so as to avoid having to deal with the smell; fucking deal with it.

In a dream world, I could sit down and have a calm, rational discussion about the Incident, with everyone present really paying attention to what others say, with minds and hearts open. Sadly, I doubt this will happen. I will be told to ignore it, to get over it, to stop complaining, they didn’t really mean it and come on, they’re your cousins can’t you just forgive them and move on? Well, no, I can’t. I won’t. If we all forgive and forget and move on without any resolution, how will we ever grow? If we never take out the rubbish and throw open the windows, how will we smell fresh air again? And once we remember what fresh air smells like, will we let the rubbish pile up again? Or will we learn?

I know what the fresh air is like, and I will do everything I can to stop the rubbish from piling up in my life.

Honours - an experience to last a lifetime?

Because the best way to introduce yourself to the internet is with an intense overshare. This year I had the joy of completing honours as a part of my bachelor of science degree, and it appears I have been gifted with this continuing, but maybe fading (we’ll see), anxiety as a result. For those not versed in academic lingo, honours is like a testing ground to see if you should go onto further research. In my case it consisted of a year long project with a thesis produced by the end of it. I’ve heard it compared to something like doing a PhD, but worse. Honours is roundly acknowledged as being difficult, tiring and stressful.

However, all of this assumes that, at the very least, your supervisors will be there to support you. Allow me to tell you that when the best thing you can say about your primary supervisor is that they happened to find you a fantastic secondary supervisor that it was an incredibly tough year. There were changes to my project, caused by my main supervisor, that made no sense, dodgy scientific and ethical practice and an unwillingness to actually give a damn. A particular highlight was my main supervisor’s attempt to bail on my entire project about a month before my thesis was due through a two line email sent only to my second and third supervisors.

Still, I managed to drag myself over the line, encouraged by my other two supervisors, with the expectation that the fear and anxiety would go away. That afterwards I would be able to forget about all the rotten things that had happened and move on to doing better things. Gaming, cooking, bludging in general. But the relief never really came. The lasting waves of anxiety that have dogged me since I gave in my thesis were totally unexpected. It’s been over a month since I submitted my thesis and I still find myself spontaneously bursting into tears for no known reason. Literally yesterday I felt panic shoot through me at the thought of doing the dishes, the fucking dishes. I need to do a last bit of Christmas shopping and the thought of all the things I need to do to get to the city and back has thus far been overwhelming me.

A large part of me is so fucking angry that my main supervisor managed to get at me so severely. Given that we’re not even on speaking terms and I could probably never talk to them ever again for fear that I would say something that I would regret later (though I’m beginning to think that there are no words strong enough), they can’t actually know that they’ve screwed me over this badly. Ultimately, after all the additional anguish, my mark was fine, and I could do a PhD if I wanted to, so this isn’t some attempt at a strike back for a bad mark.

All of this adds together to make me realise how much of a prick I’ve probably been in the past. Having had no experience with anything remotely bordering on mental illness I’ve typically shut down when exposed to it. Why exactly? I don’t know, most likely out of fear, why is a jerk a jerk to anyone? But even now as I sit here and type this, I can feel tension rolling through me for no reason. I’m safe, I’m loved, nothing that I need to do in the near future is what I would previously have described as stressful or difficult, and yet everything feels slightly shifted. It’s as if someone moved the furniture in my absence but I can’t quite figure out how or as soon as I pin down what the difference is, I lose it again. About the only time I don’t ever feel it is when I’m sucked into playing Skyrim or the like.

I’m not claiming to have any great knowledge of mental illnesses or what they’re genuinely like. But I do know that after a month of completely unexpected anxiety that I really wish would just go away, that they are clearly more complex than I imagined. I’m trying to suck it up and move on, but it’s just not working.