content production

I’ve been really disappointed this week with all kinds of content: the pronouncements of writers at the annual Brookyn book festival, a story on This American Life, a Morning Edition story, the most recent hate-filled article from Michael Pollen, the lecture content of professors I interpret for. Especially that last one. It’s been grating on me all week. Then tonight I finally realized that I want to be a content producer, not only a consumer, or reactor, or interpreter – which at it’s best is production, but co-production. I don’t want to co-author a message. I want to make my own message, at least some of the time. Oddly the next thing I did after this realization was decide I need to get a Phd. I guess that was my first answer because I’m so frustrated with professors. But really coming back to a short lived blog and writing again is a much more immediate way to slake the producer of content thirst.

Election Conversations

First, my apologies for starting a blog and then completely abandoning it.  I plan on posting again, though I’m making no promises.  I haven’t done this in so long that I accidentally made this a new page instead of a regular post.  That’s now been corrected.  Now that is out of the way, on to the actual post:

Today in two different conversations with acquaintances about the election I heard these comments that I just can’t stop thinking about. (Clearly, since I do not walk around recording my conversations, these are not exactly quotes.  They are as close as I can get):

The mean-spirited one first, “I really thought, when I saw that the country was going to have to choose between a woman and a black person – I know this is bad but – I really thought the good outcome of this is that people would turn to a third party candidate.  I mean, when there really is no other choice, I thought people would finally look to a new party.”   What do you say to that? “Fuck you!” or “It’s always nice when sexism and racism can be instrumental in furthering your own agenda.  I know we’ve all enjoyed that in the past.  You must feel really honorable.”

The second, fabulous comment, in a different conversation, “When Obama mentioned disabled people in his speech I knew the world was changing in front of my eyes.  Look at my body.  This is a disabled body.  This is who I am.  We are never looked at without fear, we are never talked about in unsentimental terms.  But he stood up there and he named us.  And he will keep naming us.  This is a new political world, one I’m proud to participate in.”

I felt the same way about Obama including gay people in his list.  I know it’s not enough.  I’m furious about Prop 8 passing in California and taking it surprisingly personally, as if the state just voted on whether or not they hated me and all my friends specifically (I know that’s myopic, but that’s how it feels.)  Being mentioned in a victory speech doesn’t make up for having rights taken away (obviously), but it gave me hope nonetheless.

exposure

I am suddenly fascinated by the stats page for this blog. For the 5 days of this blogs existence it has gotten steadily between 35 and 45 hits a day, which I find amazing since all I did to tell anyone about it was put it up as my gchat tagline and on livejournal. I’m fascinated by being linked to (thank you!), being in search engines, by all the different syndication services, all of the things which obviously go along with having a webpage. But then the next reaction – also unsurprisingly – is that with being aware that some small number of people are reading this blog, it makes me wonder what I feel ok writing about. I have this split in my regular life too: I think talking about sex, including the details of how we have sex, is incredibly important, so that we can counter the incorrect information that comes at us about sex and desire, so that we can see that there is a wider range of desire for different kinds of sex then we ever talk about, so that the definition of sex can be expanded because I do not think that the incredibly narrow definition of sex that exists in this culture right now works for anywhere close to everyone, and because I believe sex is a learned skill and we will learn about it partially from talking about it. I have been a sex educator, in one form or another, for over ten years. But I have a lot of trouble talking explicitly about my own sex life. I get embarrassed. I turn red. In public I worry about other people hearing and feel like I am exposing them without their consent (which may be true, but is not that simple, I think, if exposing people is also in the first part of the list of why we should talk about sex).

I swear I will stop writing meta-posts at some point. This is how I get used to a new idea. Next week I go to Seattle for 6 days to see my sweetie. We’ve been together for just over 5 months and this will be the first time we have had that many days in a row together. Isn’t that so strange?

Love = boring

Logan asked if I would also be writing about love here, since she noticed it is not on my list of potential topics. I was surprised to realize my answer was probably not, that I’m not really interested in writing about love, especially not love in a romantic/sexual relationship (the ways I fall in and out of being in love in my romantic friendships seem like a more likely topic, what love means in that context). I’m just not particularly interested in analyzing or deconstructing it. I actually think love, as a topic, is kind of boring. Which is odd for two reasons:

1. I generally want to analyze every possible topic. I was raised by a progressive educator who believed that you can develop any skill through any entry point, so why not pick as many entry points as possible (somehow this did not include tv, which just rots your mind, in my mother’s view). She also didn’t believe in being bored – meaning, literally, that if I told her I was bored in school she told me it was my job to find a way to make it interesting. Elementary school was basically a constant oscillation for me between being academically bored and socially terrified, so I quickly learned how to pick apart and problematize everything to at least make the boredom sort of go away. This all happened in my head, since I never spoke in school as a kid. It did make me a great student, though I’m not sure it’s a very good survival tool for life and I think it helps me only slightly more than it hurts me as an interpreter. But anyway, I am shocked that I am bored by the topic of love.

2. I am, as we speak, in love with Logan, the one who asked me the question that started this post. Does saying that I find the topic of love uninteresting make it sound like I’m not really in love? I think it does, I’m worried it does. But what is there to say about it that isn’t kind of insipid and bragging? Logan and I send each other an enormous number of text messages, which my phone saves in one long file as if they are a instant messenger conversation. I hope no one ever sees this file, which now stretches over the last 5 months, but if someone did find it, I’d be less embarrassed for them to read the parts where I tell Logan in detail exactly how I want to fuck her (or be fucked) than if they read the whole days (weeks!) where the messages are just pure, saccharine, mush.

I do not think falling in love (or being in a romantic/sexual relationship) is a kind of success. I try to almost never ask friends if they are dating anyone, because I think asking is a kind of pressure (i.e.: this is valuable enough that I should ask about it) and an implication that they are not successful unless they are dating someone. (I am happy to listen if they want to talk about it though.) I am as uninterested in talking about love as I am in talking about happiness.

But the point of the title of this blog is that nothing is definite and unchanging. Maybe in a few months I will suddenly think love is fascinating and worth writing about. In the past I’ve been pretty bored by the idea of talking about how relationships work too, but my struggling and apparent resistance to being in a relationship has suddenly made that topic pretty fascinating.

Feeds

If you are on Livejournal and prefer to read your blogs on your friends page you can now add my blog easily. Just go here and add this feed to your friends! Thank you to Projectjulie for making the feed!

Friends helping

I was just talking to Ester and she reminded me that I also hate the words (and concepts) health and pure. There will be posts to explain this. She will be showing up a lot here. Both because I love the conversations I have with her and because I see her as a moderate authority on blogging because she has had one for so long (and because I enjoy reading the current one) [on rereading this sentence. Clearly what I meant to write was: Because, because, because, because, because, because of the wonderful things she does.] Also, she has the best blogging romance story I know – not that that is the goal here. But it is something to be impressed with.

Also she feels that when writing about people you use their handle/internet persona first, but if they don’t have one using real first names (never full names) is a possible option. We also agreed that it is good form to ask people if they want a fake name. I am trying to decide if I want to use real names at all or just make up code names for everyone. I think about half the blogs I read use real names, half make them up. I am not entirely comfortable making up names for people. I am the one controlling the narrative here – that is a given – but I am not sure I want to decide how to characterize people all the way down to their names, especially when so many people in my life have named themselves. Should I make up code names? Should I have one? Anyone who even knows me a little could tell who I am from just reading that first post, but do I also want to just add my name?

Blogs – a first post

The very first blog I ever looked at was written by my first love, but despite the hazy, rosy glow he gave to everything he touched (in my eyes), I thought the form itself was self-indulgent, pompous, and annoying. Today I just added that blog to my google reader list – which already has 20 blogs on it – and finally decided it might be time I start a blog myself. I’ve had a livejournal for a little while, I’m on various social networking sites, but in general I’m always a little behind on technology for someone of my generation (mid twenties). I blame it on being raised by wolves in the deep woods on a mountain top, but I know that is an inadequate excuse. I’m finally over thinking this form is inherently bad.

So, I have not entirely formulated what this blog will be, but I have found that if I decide I am required to know all my goals and structure for a project before I begin, then I just never start. Thousands of ideas have been born and died in my head because of my need for full preplanning. Some things I might write about:

• why this blog is named The Opposite of Static
• struggles in how to define identities without creating new normative structures
• gender in general and femme in particular
• fat
• sex – queer sex, kinky sex
• attraction
• class
• long distance relationships and my bafflement that I seem to be in one
• alternate forms of relationships that include romantic friendships
• my love and discomfort with all of these listed topics and my constant need to problematize
• my inability to spell and insistence that spelling correctly is a new concept anyway that isn’t inherently valuable
• interpreting (when I figure out how to honor the ethical and professional imperative of confidentiality in reality and also in appearance so as not to create any unnecessary anxiety in any clients)
• my enduring long term love of This American Life, also my new obsession with Radio Lab and Re:sound
• that I’ve already used the word culture but am deeply uncomfortable with the concept and will never know what it means (oops, then I took the listing that mentioned culture out, but I’m keeping this one)
• my even deeper discomfort with how we relate culture and language
• why I hate the words natural, authentic, good body (this is actually a long list, but I’m drawing a blank!)
• oh and my obsession with Battlestar Galactica (and crush on Starbuck)

Doesn’t that all sound so exciting? I know, it really, really does.

If you have any helpful advice for a first time blogger, send that along. I will be fussing with the site, adding a profile, email, etc, at some point.

And some clarification: in my memory the boy mentioned in the first paragraph introduced me to his blog when we were dating, in 1996, but I just checked the blog itself and it seems to have been started in 1999. Either way, it was before blogs were a commonly understood concept. It was also with him that I first used email. My high school gave each student an address and access to all-text terminals that would freeze if you tried to navigate the baby-web. I was resistant at first to email because I thought it was cold and impersonal. Now I use email as a way to carry on an epistolary romance. Ahh, the ways we change. I like the idea of starting this blog with pointing that out, given the title.