l'été est arrivé

So I'm reading my Yoga Journal this afternoon, after having done a little yoga, waiting for the korma to do its thing in the slow cooker (customarily, we say that it's cooking), and I came across an article on the most yoga-friendly cities in the US. To my total non-shock, Boulder was on the list. There was a little article about the town, the yoga it offers, its general population. And there were pictures. And I recognized those places. I recognized Pearl Street and the new-to-me-but-old-now renovations, the rock-bridge going up the middle of the street.

And I surprised myself. Had a little  tears-prickling-behind my eyes feeling, and an acute pain in my chest. Embarrassing, gods, I don't cry; I have a little chip of ice where my heart should be, and it pushes slush through my veins. Ask my students. They know. But seriously. I was homesick. Still. After damn near 7 years here, I miss there.

I never reckoned, as a child of the Air Force's cruel whims, to get attached to a place. We never lived in one more than 3 years until I was 12. I spent high school in the same town, and my parents still live there; but my home, the place I chose to go and spend 13 years of my life, is Boulder. 20-odd square miles surrounded by reality. Oz. Berkeley with fewer Californians (but only barely). Expensive little town, with high taxes voted in by people with the money to preserve their open spaces and their zoning laws. Well. Expensive by Colorado standards; the OC has violently readjusted my notions of cost and value. Pedestrian and bike friendly. Working public transportation. Pine trees and oak and maple and the foothills and the canyons. And winter. Wind. Snow. Sometimes thunder while the snow falls. The air is dry and thin, although wetter than a lot of places along the front range. The sun is out most days, sometimes brittle and cold, sometimes too close and too hot. And the mountains--gods, the mountains. Right. There.

I planned to love SoCal. I did. I came out here determined to want to live here forever and mourn bitterly when we moved away. I planned to love the sea, the sand, the everything except the traffic and how bad could that really be, anyway? Hell, baking would be normal again! Water would boil at the right temperature! And no scraping the car in the winter.

Okay. That last thing is pretty cool. There are a lot of good things about living in greater Los Angeles. I can, on a good day, make a list. But it's not Boulder. And those things can't make up for what's missing.

One of the things I miss about LJ is the what's-playing-now feature, like the mood thingie, only cooler. My mood is generally evident from my prose. But my music! Not so much.

So in the vein of missing that feature, what's playing now is Amorphis, "My Kantele," the version off Magic and Mayhem. It's about how people who say the kantele (which is an instrument, kinda like a guitar and a dulcimer had a transporter accident) was made by the gods, fashioned out of the great pike's bones and guts, are liars. The kantele is sorrow. It is grief. It is wounds and suffering. It's a little more intense a sorrow than homesickness. But the point is--the kantele is a Finnish instrument, and the grimness of the song comes from a people shaped by a land with a thousand lakes, scraped out by glaciers; a place that sees a lot of winter, and long summer days. It's a song about the shape and stamp place leaves in a person's soul.

Gods, I want to go home.

He/She/It

 Once I had a discussion with a friend of mine about gender and sex. It went kinda like this:

"The first thing anyone sees is gender. All the rest comes after that--expectations, imaginings, everything."

"Hm. I don't know."

I tried to explain: we see a person, and we slot male/female. All judgments flow from there. We match clothing to secondary sexual characteristics. We match up voices and cadences and attitudes. We slot the person into imagined roles and qualities, based on what we've observed. We come up with words like tomboy and girlie man and slut and queer and pansy and butch. We say "pretty!" or "hot!" or whatever. When we talk to said person, we know whether to judge hir bad attitude "bitchy" or "dickly."

"Hm," my friend said again. "I don't know."

And at that point I gave up.

But no. Seriously. We (people, humans, those of us raised under patriarchy, I don't know if it's nature or nurture) get intensely uncomfortable if we don't know "what someone is." (The answer: a person. Full stop.) And we get twitchy if what we imagine doesn't match what we expect. Men are Y way. Women are X way. (ha! see what I did there?)

So then I see stories like this one about Andrej Pejic and how Barnes and Noble insisted that his image on a magazine cover be covered by opaque plastic because people might mistake him for a [nude] woman. And I think--well. A couple of things. One: Goddamn, he's beautiful. And I mean that in all senses. And then I think--why the fuck do we care? His name is Andrej, and we have topless men on the covers of magazines all the time. But of course the answer is obvious, right? He might be mistaken for a woman, and a young nude woman at that, and we can't have that. Because young nude women are, by US standards, indecent. They make us (as a society) uncomfortable in a way that half-naked men do not. But then, if we all knew the person was a she, not a he--that's a whole new batch of discomfort. This doesn't fit into our sex and gender roles! Cover it up!

Then there's the manufactured drama over Baby Storm, whose parents refuse to reveal hir sex. The child will be confused! the pearl-clutchers cry. The kid will be messed up! So explain to me, and use little words, how the kid will be messed up. Will s/he not know the proper behavior? Understand what colors s/he can wear? What fashions? If the hair should be long or short? Make-up? Because what I'm really seeing here is that people encountering the kid are upset, not the kid. They don't know how to respond to a child with no sexual cues. And they are going after the parents in all kinds of judgmentally bullshit ways, projecting their own freakout onto a little baby whose sex wouldn't be readily apparent anyway if it wasn't wearing the properly socially coded clothing.

And that's fucked up. Gods and little fish, that's fucked up.

And then I read this piece about pirates, princesses, and karate and thought--yeah. The author, Susan Schorn, says it better than I can. So I quote her here:

These kids don't find it at all unusual to put on a pirate outfit and then sit quietly at a table, gluing down sequins. They think nothing of hiking up their gowns and laying into a target like angry wallabies. It's all open to them right now, the whole big sex-and-gender-and-power puzzle is just one big fantasy, and they are free to try on any part of it they want.

Pretty soon, that will change. One set of ridiculous costumes will nudge the little girls toward one role, while another set of absurd uniforms will elbow the boys in the opposite direction. They'll move further and further apart, until the opposing camps of raging masculinity and bulging femininity are established, only meeting up at events like the UFC title fights, or, in more civilized dress, at royal weddings.

If I were a princess, I think, and I had a fairy godmother, and she granted me one wish, I'd wish that all of these kids, the boys and the girls, would find a way to hang onto their freedom. That they'd refuse be swayed by the big-screen TVs and the fashion columnists and the wait staff at the restaurants their parents bring them to, and carry on with their brilliant mash-ups of piracy, princesses, and punching bags. That all forms of power would seem equally plausible to them, and that all costumes would strike them as equally ridiculous,

I hope baby Storm has that fairy godmother. I hope the whole world gets one.

good things

1. A trio of my students, for their final project, made an old-school text-based game, alà Zork or Hitchhiker's Guide. Theirs is about a zombie apocalypse (in keeping with the course theme) with some Cold War paranoia thrown in.  So far, I have not found any grues. But I have found, and succumbed to, the zombie dogs. I think I will have to give them a grade on this long before I beat it.


2. The quarter is over. This needs no further comment.

3. I have completed my first sock. It looks like a sock. It fits. It is also pink, but that was intentional. Sometimes pink is not an awful, odious color. This is one of those times.

4. Netflix streaming has all the eps of Angel. Now I have something to watch while I spend my summer afternoons making socks. The next pair will not be pink.

5. This: