Yipes!  I didn’t mean to fall off the map.  Time just got away from me.  That keeps happening more and more often, and I can’t figure if it’s age, juggling all I do in a given day or week, living somewhere with less light, or just me becoming flakier as my life goes on.  The other day, I was setting a goal for myself for six months from now, and for a second I thought, “Oh, ugh: six months is such a long time,” until I realized that anymore, it seems like I blink and a whole year has passed me by.

Anyway.  Dad was here, and now he’s gone back to Chicago.  He did something inadvertently horrendous to one of my computers and felt horrible about it, so I had to appear much less bothered than I was so as not to cause him to feel worse, but that misadventure notwithstanding, it was a good visit.  His being here meant that he was mostly crisis-free for a couple weeks, and I got a break from trying to manage his crises.  He was in good spirits, despite getting lousy weather — which he always hits when he visits, no matter what time of year we pick.  The weekend I was away on Bainbridge at a training, he and Mark had a meat-cooking fest in my absence which they both seemed to enjoy quite a lot.  He had one very rough day here, where he was looking up old friends and found that 11 of 13 he could find had died, but it was nice to be able to be there for him, in person, to give him some support with that.  I was also able to reiterate that I need to make what efforts I can to get him into a safer, sounder living situation and while I’m not sure how much he’s going to help me with the follow-through, he was not resistant to that.

The thing that always sucks, of course, is saying goodbye to him when he goes.  Given his age and the way that he lives (if you can call it that), there’s always this ooky feeling in my guts that any given goodbye is the last one, and I freak out a bit, worried there’s something I should make sure I say or do just in case.

While the visit was good, I spent most of the weekend simply enjoying having my house back, and some space to myself.  Over the last two and some weeks, I’ve had the visit from my Dad, a group night for the election, also a visit for a few days from a supporter, the four days in a group immersion on Bainbridge, an extra night with someone (who I swear I was separated at birth from: I’m so bummed she lives in Austin) from that training here at home and two friends swung by from Minneapolis.  Seeing all of those people was absolutely the good stuff, however that is a LOT of people for me to be around without having any time at all to myself.  When I need to decompress, I decompress alone, not with other people.  I dig people, and I’m outgoing, for sure, but I’m someone who you will rarely hear complaining about being or feeling alone.

There weren’t enough kids at the residential center this week for me to go in and do education, but tomorrow I have a presentation for an Americorps thing that should be good.  The training I was in the week before last was for Teen Talking Circles, a model which we plan to bring into some work through the clinic, as well as bringing sex ed into an existing circle, and which I also want to figure out a way to use at Scarleteen.  Saturday I head back over to the island for the day to participate in and observe one of the existing circles to see how we can best work this.  Amidst all of that is a pile of the usual Scarleteen work, some clinic work, a bunch of clerical boredom, and a batch of other things I am, per usual, feeling totally behind with and really need to find some way to get at least marginally caught up with before I head to Chicago on the 4th.

Tangentially, I was on the phone with the education director for the clinic expressing that with the Obama win, I’m finding myself trying to be sure that any of us working in sexual or reproductive health and justice make the most of this.  We were both expressing that over the last eight years, so much of the work we have done as a group in this arena has had to be focused on the defensive, on managing crisis, on trying to repair what kept getting broken or robbed that it’s a bit tricky to try and move our minds out of that mode to be sure we don’t miss the opportunity to work differently while we have it.  Merle Hoffman, at RH Reality Check last week, did mention a backlash to be concerned with — and I think she’s sage in her concerns — but I also want to be sure that we find ways to start doing so many of the things we have wanted to do, but haven’t been able to, now that we’ll have decent administrative support.

I think, for instance, about all of the things the feminist women’s health centers and organizations so badly wanted to do — more holistic self-care for women, really focusing on the empowerment of reproductive choices, nurturing bonds between women around abortion, sex education — around and after Roe Vs. Wade, but how few of them were able to come into being given the antichoice rise.  I’ve been noticing over the last year how many progressive people seem to have changed even the way they talk about things like abortion and teen sexuality, and how clearly influenced by the right some of that has been: if I hear one more person talk about how abortion is always something we want to avoid, how it’s always so sad, or listen to someone for the millionth time feel the only way they can defend it is to talk about rape, incest or genetic issues, I will likely scream.  Same goes with teen and young adult sexuality: this “waiting is always better” stuff has not only gotten really old, it’s seriously dishonest, especially coming from plenty of adults who didn’t “wait” themselves and had a fine time sexually in their teens or twenties.

So, time for a mental shift and some serious planning.  If we’ve learned anything over the last few decades, it’s that we can never count on some sort of perpetual state of grace when it comes to this stuff.  The pendulum always keeps on swinging, and you never know when it’s going to swing back.

On a lighter note, somehow, a couple years ago, I got put on the newsletter for the American Family Association.  I have no idea how, but once I started seeing these mails, I was quite delighted I did — not because they fill me in on some sort of super-secret diabolical plans, but because they show how freaking SILLY these folks so often are, and it makes it a lot easier for me to relax about them.

Suffice it to say, after the election, the emails have now moved to a daily delivery, in a constant state of panic, because, as you no doubt know, progressives want to take everyone’s rights away by adding or protecting rights for everyone.  (Don’t try and make sense of it, just roll with it.)  Headlines such as “Advice to Christians: Defend life, prepare for persecution,” “Jesus ejected from school,” “Kindergartners given homosexual ‘pledge cards’,” and “Conservative expression on campuses in peril,” are a few of the latest.

But my favorite panic-induced headline of last week? Men in Drag at the White House?!  This bulletin involved several paragraphs about how Obama is going to have men wearing heels (Don’tcha just bet that he’ll even REQUIRE it?) who work for him. Obama has made clear that both gender identity and sexual orientation are included in their hiring policy per nondiscrimination: that’s where this comes from.  It addressed how women who work for the federal government will now be utterly unsafe from rampant attacks in bathrooms from the vicious transgender women who may well be allowed to use them.  You know how how those fights over the toilet paper end when there’s an MTF involved, after all: it’s always all broken nails, blood and hairspray over but that one little square.  Oh, the terror.

filed under Heather Corinna
posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 8:03 am

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