| Wednesday, April 02, 2008 |
| landscapes |
Because non-content makes me feel worse than no content, here's a writing exercise designed to show you the difference between writing what you know and what you don't. Spend five minutes writing about your hometown, stop, and spend five minutes writing about Hanoi on a Sunday afternoon [substitute alternate city if you are familiar with Hanoi].
If nothing else, Wheeling is flat. It has no skyline. You can not, however, see the stars. Essential suburbia, the houses were cloned from other houses, grown in test-tubes and transplanted onto identical plots of land along a well-lit street that ensured a hazy, homogeneous view of the sky.
Hanoi on a Sunday afternoon has flowers I have never heard of. The sidewalks all run alongside steep embankments to pristine rivers where college students spend entire afternoons searching for four-leaf clovers.
The exercise was introduced to help a boy in workshop who kept submitting half-page rants instead of well-established essays. After we'd finished, we went around the room to see who was better at which type of writing. Mine was the only instance in which we couldn't tell. It probably doesn't in fact just mean that I am awesome at everything, but for lack of a more interesting explanation, I'll go with that. |
posted by La Malinche @ 10:45 PM   |
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| Tuesday, April 01, 2008 |
| vague much |
| I lost something yesterday that I was hanging on to, and it left me looking at my hands, wondering what to do with them. |
| posted by La Malinche @ 11:31 PM |
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| Monday, December 17, 2007 |
| found: i want a dyke for president. |
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| posted by La Malinche @ 8:34 PM |
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| Monday, November 26, 2007 |
| travelling mercies |
When my grandmother died, I was afraid I'd forget her because I didn't have any specific memories of her. Her name was Theresa.
When my grandfather, over a decade later, was delusional and on his deathbed, he called out for Suzie while holding my hand, and I instantly remembered. He called my grandmother Suzie. No one knows why, it is an inside joke that he took with him when he died; but he called out for Suzie, and I instantly remembered. I still have no specific memories of my grandmother, but now I can hold onto the name Suzie and remember what it was like to have her around.
It really is impossible to eulogize someone. |
| posted by La Malinche @ 10:05 PM |
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| Thursday, August 23, 2007 |
| more gay politics |
So, people--gay people, mostly--keep talking about Bill Richardson's gaffe at the logo/HRC gay debate. Whether or not he was confused by the question, I don't know. He does have a point when he asks people to look instead at his record of legislation and hiring as governor. But here's what he should have said:
"I don't know."
Because no one does know. And that's not even the question. That question--"choice or biology"--is horribly slanted. There are really two questions: choice or innate, and biology or development. The answer to the first is easy for most people. You don't choose who turns your head as you walk down the street, and you don't choose whom you fall in love with. As for biology, we really don't know. More gay men then straight have a counterclockwise whorl. About 60% of gay men have a specific marker on a specific chromosome (Xq28). Neither of those things are conclusive. We don't know whether there is a genetic switch that turns on the gay, and the prospect is scary anyway. Would parents--well-meaning or otherwise--hope for a form of gene therapy to turn the switch off? Or is it developmental, it is something that is affected by environment and circumstance, and therefore possibly fluid? Does that mean we should try to change; is one sexuality better than the other?
So Bill Richardson should have said "I don't know", and then he should have said exactly what he did. That it doesn't matter. Whether sexuality is genetic or environmental has no bearing on a person's capacity for love or goodness, and should have no bearing on how we as a society treat them.
And for the love of god, someone stop all the major candidates from talking about civil unions as though they are completely equal to marriage. Even if they contain all the same legal rights, we as a nation know from experience that separate-but-equal isn't, which makes it particularly disappointing to hear a black presidential candidate equate them. This is another point where Richardson is right. Civil Unions are achievable, they are a step in the right direction. But stop talking about them as if they are equal. |
| posted by La Malinche @ 1:31 PM |
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