Oh hush.

These have been sitting in a draft for a while, so some are a bit dated.

Being the Visible Femme – Thoughts from Autostraddle on how to be a out, visible, lesbian femme.

How to be a fan of problematic things – Amazing! A must read for fans of Lord of the Rings, anything Robert Heinlein wrote, 99% of comics out there, Orson Scott Card, or anything else that is both awesome and really problematic. The comments are also well-worth a read.

A 13-year-old hits a slam-dunk on why slut shaming is wrong - If you have a bad taste in your mouth after Taylor and the Girl Scout transgender thing, WATCH THIS VIDEO! She’s my hero.

Stuff cis people say to trans people – Part of the “Stuff ____ people say to ____ people” trend, but still hilarious. “So what’s your real name?”

Finally, I’ll be in Indianapolis tomorrow and Thursday, performing at Butler University. More info is at their website. Hope you can check it out if you’re in the area. Let me know if you’ll be there!

Not the kind of race I mean

I was recently having a conversation with a number of artistic peers, discussing the impact of our personal and community histories on our art and artistic process. I don’t remember who the question was raised by, but the group consisted of a mix of racial/ethnic/gender/sexual identities, making for good conversation.

In general we all agreed that our various personal and community histories – of religion, race, ethnicity, language, geography, class, sexuality, gender, and so on and on and on and on – played a factor in how we approached creating art. While it was a great conversation, and fodder for more discussion, I’m less interested in that than in something which happened after.

During the conversation, I said, “It’s been interesting going from presenting as part of a strong, privileged group – white, heterosexual, male – to an oppressed group: queer, trans, female.  I try to both be conscious of and artistically honor that oppression while being aware of the privilege I still do posses.”

Then, while giving someone a ride home – who identifies as black, female, lesbian – she turned to me and said, “Your comment really surprised me, since I don’t think of you as white.”

What?

She continued saying that my olive complexion doesn’t meet her idea of ‘white’ness. And it’s true. At various points, I’ve been thought to be Hispanic, American Indian, India-subcontinent-Indian, Pacific Islander, Italian, Arab, and – most humorously – ‘ethnic looking.’ (I shit you not. By a photographer wanting diversity in a high school photo shoot. She didn’t intend for me to hear.) My mom jokes that, when she came back from summer vacation when I was young and we spent every day at the beach, the (very dark-skinned) custodian at her school would come up to her and say “You could be my daughter!” I’m not too pasty even in the dead of winter.

But not white?

The friend who said all this felt that, in some ways, the more old-school way of looking at race was more accurate. Race, she said, is more of a subdivision of culture and geography than a huge lumping together of sort-of-similar skin tones. So, she concluded, Jewish people weren’t white.

There is certainly historical precedence for her opinion: “among those not considered white at some points in American history have been: the Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Spaniards, white Hispanics, Slavs, and Greeks.” But she didn’t mean that I wasn’t white in  racist way, as a justification for discrimination, just in an observational way.

It reminded me of a story I heard at a storytelling conference. A black woman was talking about her experience as a voter’s rights activist in Chicago in the 1960s. She apparently pissed off the the wrong people in the Chicago machine and  so her dad said she had to leave Chicago for a little while: white people were out to get her. He was going to send her to Israel to stay with some friends, because “Jews aint white.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about all this for the past week, particularly as I just finished the excellent book Constantine’s Sword, which covers the 2,000 year relationship between Judaism and the Catholic Church. Hopefully that’ll be the subject of another post one of these days.

But back to race. Googling “are jews white” doesn’t offer much help. An interesting take on genetic information. An essay from Majority Rights, a site which “discusses various issues related to the preservation of Western culture and the ethnic genetic interests (EGI) of people of European ancestry.” I do, however, like “Jews and the Problem of Whiteness,” which discusses community relations between Jewish and Black populations through the lens of race. From that essay:

As Lerner points out, Jewish whiteness “is the privilege to renounce one’s Judaism. By and large the way to get into this system is to take off your kippah, cut off your beard, hide your fringes; in other words, to reject your entire cultural and religious humanity.” I seek to empathize, here, as my previous discussion of the sociological passing of blacks should indicate. Nonetheless, the Jewish option to be white, however difficult, has been exercised widely.

That’s a good summary of why the idea of my not being white kind of surprised me. The history of Jewish oppression is absolutely a history of racism, of othering, of bigotry. It shares lots with the racism which impacts people of color. But I have at least somewhat adequate passing privilege (how I hate that term!) as white. Part of that, admittedly, has to do with geography: how I’m perceived as white versus Jewish would probably be different in different parts of the country, and of the world. My mom and my brother have both talked about living in smaller communities where their Judaism was strange or exotic. My dad has told me about going to civil rights marches in Chicago’s northern suburbs, where families had signs on the lawn reading “No dogs, blacks, or Jews.”

It seems like the ‘whiteness’ of Jews depends on perspective. That makes me remember a page from my high school year book. The editors had surveyed students from different Chicago-area high schools and asked them what they thought of Evanston, a very diverse community, and its high school, which has a huge range of student academic achievement. Everyone north of Evanston (generally more wealthy suburbs) saw Evanston as “ghetto” and dangerous. Everyone south (generally less wealthy, in Chicago proper) saw Evanston as rich, white, privileged.

The idea of racial identity changing with geography is fascinating to me. That, growing up in Chicago, I’m white. Growing up in Generic Small Town, I might not have been perceived as white. Or identified my own race as something other than white. And how much identity depends on other people, as a reference for ones self.

I’ll leave you with this chart:

I talked to my lawyer, who said this isn’t great news – that would be if Neal decided to cooperate with the EEOC from the beginning. But it does mean that the EEOC hasn’t forgotten about my complaint, and hasn’t (yet) said it’s not under their jurrisdiction.

In other news, my dad sent me a Chicago Tribune article about Dr Schechter, a plastic surgeon in the Chicago suburbs who does gender reassignment surgery. This is very interesting to me, since the only folks I’d found doing surgery were decidedly not in the Chicago area. At the same time, the fact that I haven’t heard of this guy makes me hesitant – all the doctors I’ve been researching are well-established, with reviews online over at this site. The article also says Schecther works with the Drs Etner, who I’m not fans of.

Has anyone heard anything about him? Positive or negative?

First, the gap in writing. I’ve come to love blogging, something that is honestly surprising to me. It’s cathartic, a great source for performance material, and has allowed me to engage in a worldwide online community. Blogging is also tiring. It requires, much like the performance work I do, a public display of emotion, of experience, of self. And while I was on the road, I was surprised to find it took a little too much out of me. In retrospect, perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise: Flyering, doing interviews, staying with strangers, then doing very personal shows followed by talkbacks, being ‘on’ all the time, it’s tiring. Lots of fun, too, but tiring. And so when I got home at the end of the day, to the house I was staying at or to hang out with the friends I’d made on the road, I was reluctant to crack open my laptop and deal with all that again online. Not that it was bad stuff; as I said, I had an amazing time touring No Gender Left Behind. I’m already looking at touring opportunities for the coming year. But it also took a lot out of me.

I’ve also been struggling with how to write about things I don’t necessarily want to post. I’ve become used to posting just about everything in my life, so when I’ve had interactions with friends, or considerations about life, or just thoughts I don’t think are worth posting, I’m not sure the best way to do that. This seems like a silly question, but I’m wondering how a blogger is supposed to keep a diary? (I’d welcome any thoughts.) That is, do I want to use this blog and just keep certain things private? Go with a hand-written journal? (I hate my handwriting, and type faster than I write.) Find a free journal site like Penzu? I want to be in a good writing frame of mind, without second-guessing myself. I’m probably over-thinking things, I know…

Now that those things are out of the way, though, lets catch up a little bit.

Fringe was awesome. I was in Kansas City in July, Indianapolis in August, and Chicago in September. I received consistently good press response, audience response (and numbers!) and just generally had a blast. It was also a great learning experience, in many ways. First, and perhaps most important, I enjoy touring. I enjoy doing the travel thing, handing out flyers, meeting people, seeing shows. I know great performers who don’t like all that, or who aren’t very good at the self-promotion end, and it’s tough for them. Touring was exhausting, but also left me charged with the knowledge that A) I have a product people are willing to pay money for and B) there are people out there making money doing what I’d like to be doing.

Not to shabby.

As for turning that excitement into gigs, I’m still working on that part… A huge bonus of Fringe was networking, both with theatrical producers and (much much more) with other artists. Folks who were able to give advice on Fringe touring (get to Orlando and Minneapolis, do the Canadian Fringe circuit, avoid DC’s Capitol Fringe), self promotion (get a good press packet together), looking at colleges and universities (organizations like NACA, how to contact student activity boards, etc), and on staying sane on the road. (Hint: Lots of foursquare. Not the phone app, the game with the ball. AMAZING!)

So. I’m going to work on the rest of today’s to-do list. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this post will return The Thang Blog to the realm of regular updates.

Of course, finding that balance between too little and too much is the real trick…

Also, Steam is having a sale and I’m allowing myself one game. Trying to decide between between Left 4 Dead 1+2, Far Cry 1+2, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and GTA4…Thoughts?

I asked her [the friend] to count her spoons. She asked why, and I explained that when you are healthy you expect to have a never-ending supply of “spoons”. But when you have to now plan your day, you need to know exactly how many “spoons” you are starting with. It doesn’t guarantee that you might not lose some along the way, but at least it helps to know where you are starting. She counted out 12 spoons. She laughed and said she wanted more. I said no, and I knew right away that this little game would work, when she looked disappointed, and we hadn’t even started yet. I’ve wanted more “spoons” for years and haven’t found a way yet to get more, why should she? I also told her to always be conscious of how many she had, and not to drop them because she can never forget she has Lupus.

Very well-written and worth reading. Check it out.

There is incredible time dilation – things that subjectively must have taken mere seconds feeling like they’ve lasted forrrrrrever, even though they objectively been mere seconds (it feels like you’re thinking of a ton of different thoughts but I think it’s really thiking the same thought continuously but forgetting each moment of thinking so the single second of thought feels like one million tiny cuts of seconds) (this sentence felt like it took 3 or 4 minutes to type but it must have only bean thirty seconds cuz my typing speed continued as normal and annie and piet’s discussion was objectively only a few thoughts further)

A LOG OF THINGS: A BLACKOUT TEST

annie’s terribly creepy frog prince

“becc’s gonna lose it”

why do i get cough-y when i’m high?

the rhymes in this song are really sub-par

too tall frog, not two toe wog

annie and the sorcerers apprentice making out with gomez

xmen, discussion of what to watch when high

boy with the striped pijamas

tinfoil ball

laughing at the holocaust

oh it’s so sad

kissing

can focus for bref moments with intense focus (but not enough to write this sentence)

can you get me water? ahhhhhhh

welcome to masterpiece theater

it’s actually a metaphor for the sentate

get out of my bar freak

TWITCH

So much twitching. This is only somewhat enjoyable

unreasonable sollution of the stick seatbelt

i want to be everyone in this movie

professor x is gonna SAVE LOGAN

this doesn’ really make my pains particularly less

you want salty things

i don’t wanna be a ruiner. it’s stilled with instand gratification i’ts eyrthing you could every dream it could be

i wantt some pizzaa…. and i wish i hadn’t had as much

why would his shoes not make it

riff tracks

wait when when did they kidnaprogue? oh right she ran into the woods after being tricked to leave

oh james

i want that chocolate sooo baaaaad

why do they have so many badass cars? where does prof x get his money

i forgot how cheesy some o these special effect are, but the movie is still sooooo gooooood

test of science

it’s like the room zooms in, become less high while juggling, but then zooms way back out when high

it’s like the room zooms in it’s like the room zooms out it’s like the roomzooms in it’s like the room zooms out

what convenient colors to denote evil

shoulda run up to him and punched him in the face

still unwilling to make sacrifices….that’s what makes you weak

i would read that comic. of malcom x using magic to turn someone black, and martin luther king has to stop him

I embarked upon a Cunning Plan. I discovered that my work had been pirated, and was available for free on BitTorrent sites located in the many outlaw server dens of former Marxist countries. So I downloaded my own work from thence with the intention of saving the work of scanning my books— I figured I’d let the pirates do the work, and steal from them. While this seemed karmically sound, there proved a couple problems.

First, the scans were truly dreadful and full of errors. (Even if you’re desperate for my work, I can’t really recommend them.) A lot of time has been spent copy-editing, both by me and by Kathy— which isn’t really so bad, because this would have to be d0ne anyway.

But second, apparently a few of my books were so obscure that they flew under the radar of even the pirates! You can’t imagine how astounded I was when I discovered this.

Best of luck!

(Originally from Consumerist)

Sassy fashion

BlogHer is having a nifty promotion surrounding the launch of the book Nothing to Wear? and a new line of QVC clothing and accessories, VT-Luxe. You could win the book itself, or clothing of your choice form the VT-Luxe line. Go to http://goo.gl/BBBom to enter, and good luck!