I don't know what to say.

On the one hand, Obama is president. I feel so much more hope and possibility now than I did last week. The news came yesterday while I was in rehersal: my stage manager's mother texted her, and she interrupted our runthrough to say "You guys, Obama is president!" That completely disrupted rehersal for a while, of course. There were jumpings up and down, and screamings, and cryings, and our director let us go in time to catch the last half of his acceptance speech. I cried again, because yes we can.

On the other hand, Prop 8 passed. Words cannot express my disappointment and sadness. There are so many people in California now who cannot enjoy a basic human right, because the church-based groups mistook the government for a religious authority. That's basically all it is, and it makes me hurt inside. On the bright side, I suppose, those who are already married will stay married. There's nothing people can do about that. But those who were going to get married? They have nothing now, and I cannot understand the kind of mind that would accept or encourage that.

On the right foot, our government is so very clunky and impossible and slow to act that it's really hard to get anything irredeemably stupid done. I have hope that with Obama as president, we may be able to overturn Prop 8, either by reamending the California constitution or by fighting it up to the Supreme Court. I believe that someday we can make this better, and I believe that we have hope now, which we didn't have before.

Also, Prop 4 is looking like it's not going to pass. Which makes me happier.

AND VIRGINIA WENT TO OBAMA. You guys, OMG. Virginia has been Republican for the past ten elections or something like that, and it went to Obama. That says something. Part of it must be my baby brother finally eligible to vote, but there's something else there too. Virginia, adopted home, I'm proud of you. Keep up the good work.

1) Ursula Vernon is pissed, and with good reason.

My thoughts on the matter? I believe that no one should constrict or constrain an artist to produce something. This puts me at odds with the publishing industry, somewhat, in that they seem to believe they can contract people to produce a specific product, exactly to their outline (romance industry, I'm looking at you). This isn't completely constraining, though; a writer has to have a certain amount of enthusiasm for the project in order to contract to create it. Writing to prompts is also different, as a prompt will give you an opening, but will not tell you what to write.

On the other hand, I can sort of see where the email writer comes in. Not as regards Billy Collins, of course; he's one of my favorite poets and I find him very accessible. However, throughout my academic career, poetry has had to mean something, and it's usually a meaning completely opposite to what was given. This sort of analytic reading of poetry drives me batty. It implies that for a poem to be a "good" poem, it must be either entirely metaphorical or entirely inaccessible (T. S. Eliot, the Wasteland, I'm looking at you!). Now, most poets don't believe this. See, Billy Collins, Paul Zarzyski, even T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Academics, though, certainly do.

Newsflash, academics: just because something's fun to read doesn't mean it's automatically trash.

So it seems to me that this is more a problem of how we read than of how we write. If we cannot enjoy something, we tend to say that it sucks and throw it away. Okay, fine, whatever, you're not constraining the author at all, you're simply exercising your right as the audience to ignore them. However, when you then say that because you don't like it, nobody else can because it's trash, and the author must immediately change their ways, then it becomes a problem.

2) Sherwood Smith, on writing and memory

For me, the books that bring back my childhood most clearly are The Neverending Story, the Hobbit, and Tamora Pierce, most especially her Alanna series. I can remember sitting on my bed, curled up around my teddy bear, reading with absolute amazement. The idea that somewhere there were people that dreamed just like me was such an irresistable one. I remember being absolutely stunned that people could dream like that, the same way I did. Up until then, I thought I was alone. I think that's when words became my friends. The Neverending Story in particular made me feel as if I could quite happily spend the rest of my life stuck in a book.

I've never lost that feeling, not really. You may have noticed. :D

WARNING: This post consists of a great deal of self-analysis in the context of society that, while it may explain last weekend's PostSecret of sorts, may also stray into TL;DR territory. It is cut for your convienence, but feel free to read and agree or disagree as you see fit.

( Beyond the edges of this map lie great herds of the mysterious teal deer... )

1) Which Witch, Eva Ibbotson
2) Twilight, Stephanie Meyer
3) The Gammage Cup, Carol Kane
4) The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman
5) The Observation Deck, Naomi Epel
6) The Secret of Platform 13, Eva Ibbotson
7) What You Wear Can Change Your Life, Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine
8) The Lioness and Her Knight, Gerald Morris
8) Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony, Eoin Colfer
9) The Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
10) My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding, Jim Butcher et al.
11) My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon, Jim Butcher et al.
12) Rose of No Man's Land, Michelle Tea
13) Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
14) The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
15) The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
16) Over Sea, Under Stone, Susan Cooper
17) A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin
18) Promiscuities, Naomi Wolf

A note about this last book before we go on to what I'm currently reading. Promiscuities talks about the sexual coming of age of young women in the sixties and seventies, and much of what she talks about makes sense. Our society places a negative value on female sexual desire. Men are supposed to be the aggressors, women the defenders. Therefore, if a woman is raped, it must be because she did not defend herself well enough. It's not the man's fault, because he can't help himself. Maybe she in some way showed some kind of desire, which in our society makes her a slut and therefore to be punished.

Seriously. Look at the words used to describe female sexuality and sexual organs: cunt, pussy, whore, slut. Even the word "vagina", while not ugly, sounds suspiciously clinical. You know there's a problem when Rayne from Least I Could Do shows a greater respect for women in the language he uses about them than the average, everyday man in the street.

Women deserve to be sexually active without social punishment, just as men are. Women deserve the right to desire men or women and the right to have that desire validated and approved by society. Having female desire suppressed and denied does no one any good; it leads to higher incidents of rape (because all good girls say no, even if they mean yes) and date rape (you have to get a woman drunk before she responds) and damage to everyone, men and women alike. For women, the damage is obvious. For men, it's a little more insidious. How, if you are a genuinely nice guy, like my boyfriend, do you approach a woman and try to please her when she doesn't even place a decent value on her own body and sexuality, and when society demands that you have sex with her to prove your own masculinity?

I'm not saying that anyone should be ashamed of having sex. Quite the opposite. I just wish that there was equal value on desire.

Currently Reading: Storm Front, Jim Butcher; Inkhart, Cornelia Funke; Legacy of Love, Joanna Trollope; Poetry, Language, Thought, Martin Heidegger (expect some strong language from me on this one)

So it's Blog for Choice Day. Here's mine.

I have grown up in a world where women have choices, abortion being one of them. I have grown up in a world where feminisim is the norm rather than the minority. I have grown up in a world where my rights are not taken away simply because I have breasts and a uterus. Through my life, I have hated being a woman at times; perhaps because my breasts were swollen and sore, or because I was suffering debilitating cramps, or because I couldn't be named Jack or Roger or whatever was my favorite boy's name of the week. However, I never hated being a woman because I couldn't play on a sports team, or because my interest in math and science was discouraged*, or because I was told I couldn't do things because I was a girl.

I do not personally favor abortion. If I was pregnant right now with an unplanned baby, I would likely not abort it. I obviously cannot speak for my own state of mind when I have never been in that situation, but one of my dearest friends was adopted, the result of an unplanned pregnancy. My two little cousins are the result of an unplanned pregnancy, and I love them dearly. I cannot imagine living life without the three of them, and I can't imagine that I would deprive someone else of a Sophy, or a Ty or Jon.

And yet, and yet, and yet. How can I walk up to someone else and tell them that they cannot have an abortion because I say so?

How can I look a woman pregnant with her father or brother's baby in the eye and tell her she must bear that child, regardless of possible genetic complications, and bear the shame? How can I tell a rape victim that she must have her rapist's child and delay by nine months or more the start of her own healing? How can I tell a woman who knows her child will live for perhaps a day out of the womb because of genetic problems that she must go through that trauma?

Less urgently, how can I tell a woman whose boyfriend pulled up stakes when he found out she was pregnant that she has to raise a child alone? How can I say to someone who cannot support a child or afford proper prenatal care that they should go ahead and risk it anyway? How can I tell a young married couple that they should have children because that's their job?

How can I tell anyone else how to make this choice?

Abortion is a deeply personal and painful subject. Why then do we insist on drawing it into the public realm, where it does not belong? No one can know the personal circumstances or feelings of a pregnant woman except herself. No one can make a choice without weighing all the factors first. To make a choice as possibly heartrending as whether or not to get an abortion, the decision-making process becomes even more important.

If we were to reverse Roe v. Wade and make abortion illegal again, we would be taking away that choice and that decision process. We would in effect be making that personal and painful decision for every woman on the planet. We would be putting the lives of children who do not even exist yet and who may not ever exist ahead of the mental and physical health of women and girls today.

We would be telling women and girls that their own thoughts and feelings did not matter, do not matter, and never will matter. We would be telling them that their choices are invalid. We would be telling them that their children are more important than they are, and that, God knows, is a perception far too widespread already.

No, I would not have an abortion myself. But I grew up in a world where women have rights and choices. I will not stand by and watch those rights and choices taken away.




*Quite the opposite, really; I had a teacher encourage my nonexistent interest with promises of puzzles and explosions and was bitterly disappointed in high school when we never got to blow anything up.