working over an old horse

A friend of mine had an old dell pc lying around, so I conned her into donating it to my household for use as a general internet surfing box. Little did I know that it's from May 1999. Happy 10th birthday little pentium II! I can't believe it's still running and as perky as it ever was. With the extra ram I threw in it, it actually ran win 98 pretty peppily. Talk about a walk down memory lane, booting up that system. Back in the day when logging into a profile was optional and ctl-alt-del rebooted the machine...

I'm in the process of installing ubuntu 8.10 on it, and besides being slower than molasses in winter, it seems to be happy enough with the installer. It accepted my addition of 512 Mb of RAM, and ran the live disk just fine, so I'll be super impressed with this linux distro if it runs all the weird old hardware I bolted onto it without complaint.

Somewhere between worlds

I'm sitting in some coffee shop somewhere, discovering that I'm between worlds, between words, and generally settling into a density of immobility. I've been missing writing, missing that sharp sense of articulation, missing the balance of release of words slipping off an insolent tongue.

Where to start when there's a wall of emptiness staring back at me. Perhaps she's right. Perhaps empty walls do equal empty minds.

minus 15

Hmm...the only thing I've discovered that's entertaining about the weather being in the land of minus 15 F is that the cats become balls of static electricity and are constantly shocking everything. Including each other.

still not dead...

still struggling with the culture of middle america:

- got told last week that wisconsin doesn't haven't any campus climate policies on the books, therefore if a professor is openly disrespectful of marginalized groups, the office of diversity cannot intervene except in the case of where a state or federal law may have been violated. Because I rather was enjoying having to sit through a class with a prof who, when another student outed me as genderqueer, openly suggested that ENFORCING gender roles is both normal and acceptable. And that academia is privileged for being able to have such a liberal view of it. At some point i'm going to have to tell that jackass that I may be privileged, but my experience of the world is a right and not a privilege.

- had to yell at my housing co-op on sunday for not being willing to understand that having a gender quota defined by the gender binary for certain meetings is unfair if the house has a non-discrimination policy based on gender expression. I had to explain that the policy places an undue burden of disclosure and education on any non-normatively gendered members of the house (of which there are quite a few). E.g. "I'm not required to discuss my gender identity with you and I don't want to discuss my gender identity just in order to be able to attend one of your meetings. You don't have to discuss yours."

- have grad skool applications due on friday, what the fuck am i doing with myself, anyway?

- have papers due

- am leaving the state next week to head back to CA

- and did i mention it's my birthday?

how the west was won...

Wisconsin was the first place that I encountered homophobic slurs in bathroom scrawl. I had encountered bathroom scrawl before, mostly in mens washrooms, but it was mostly of a more banal variety. I mean, some of it was sexist, most of it was idiotic, but it was rarely, if ever scary. At the med school in Davis, CA, I remember finding a note that said "I should have gone to Stanford instead," and after thinking about the long hours of thankless studying and demoralizing institutional culture, I sympathized with his feelings of learning later that an important choice was poorly met.

One of the first times I was at the UW Milwaukee campus, a group of us were in the bathrooms in the Union, only to discover such uplifting commentary as "Die AIDS faggots". I was shocked. Somehow I just couldn't understand where the author was coming from. Was he a jilted lover, infected and left to suffer the consequences? Was he a right wing soapboxer? A closet case? Are we still trapped in the 1980's preconceptions of AIDS as a 'gay' disease? Does he somehow think a virus is going to morally differentiate between the virgin mary homo and the straight cum dumpster of tinsel town? What is he so afraid of, that he needs to share his opinions in this way?

Last week I had seen something in one of the stalls at work about somebody or other being a faggot. I didn't recognize the name, and it wasn't until today that I realized that all of the stalls in that bathroom were scrawled with "Nate Higgins is a faggot". And the more I sat and stared at the nondescript hand writing, the more I realized the less I knew. Who was this Nate? And did the author mean this literally, or was it some kind of slur against his masculinity? Is it fair to ask clarifying questions in this semipublic forum?

Ten minutes at the computer offered up the insight that this 'Nate' probably was not a co-worker or student in the building, but rather a hockey coach in the upper midwest college hockey circuit.

Which leads me to question of how to respond. Leaving it there seems to endorse the homophobia that it engenders. And yet removing it is censorship. After thinking about it for a while, I decided the best response was something that both calls this issue out into the open and obfuscates it by invoking other stereotypes of masculinity, colonialism and sexuality:

"Hey honey, there ain't nothing wrong with a little buttlove, it's how the west was won."

Still alive,

skool is crazy. got a crazy eye inflammation thing going on last week. got told i might lose my eye, might have: lupus, rheumatoid vascularitis, hiv, syphilis, or some other immune or autoimmune disorder. this week my eye recovered, got told that i probably don't have any of those unpleasant diseases, and am getting to go about my regular life again, which mostly just involves computers, books, cats, and acrobatic butt sex.

In other words, not much news to report here. I was also in OR last weekend for a straight cowboy wedding. Talk about a clusterfuck of family values, and I'm not talking about the gay kind. And yet I still got a drunken lady hitting on me at the end of the night... straightest place on the west coast, and still can't escape that queer feeling. Go figure.

Skool is still craziness on a stick. Too much stuff, not enough sleep, and my stomach is killing me because of the meds they put me on for my eye. But then they also gave me zoloft to help me cope with living in the midwest. And a social anxiety disorder.

So the big question at the moment is: do I care? Probably not, but if my cat comes up and enters attack snuggle mode, then I'll be forced to reciprocate. And why is the economy going to hell in a hand basket now instead of months ago? Strange days.

well, i guess it's an improvement...

I've gotten to the point in transitioning that my face is no longer breaking out. which i do truly appreciate. however, unfortunately, the pimples have just moved to my ass.

fantastic. really fantastic.

An apology to Hytemlia

Over many years of living in cramped cities, I have inadvertently found myself becoming a disciple of Asphaltia, goddess of parking. I am not an ardent believer, but rather I find myself offering up incense and incentives while circling blocks and blocks of cars seperated only by slim margins of driveways and fire hydrants. Being that I gave up my car earlier this summer, I find myself wondering if I will miss her benevolent presence in my life, or if she will instead confer her benevolence on my thin skull whilst I pedal my way betwixt impatient drivers.

But I fear I must also offer up an apology to Bitonia, goddess of code and Hytemlia, goddess of the internet. For I have created indescretions against them. Forgive me, Bitonia. Forgive me, Hytemlia. I am complicit in using software that creates mauled and ugly code through the use of a buggy WYSIWYG HTML editor. I promise that I understand the weakness of my ways. Please understand, I shall to atone by creating a beautifully simple and yet effective hand coded informational page, marked up in validated XHTML, and laid out like a haiku declaring my dedication to your wisdom.

The advantage of living next to a construction site...

The advantage of living next to a construction site is that I never have to set an alarm. The jackhammer goes off at dawn all by itself.

Quote of the Day:

and i am, if nothing else a human sponge, mopping the floors for stray bits of unloved knowledge for my curio cabinet of curiosities.