Child of the Air

A note: as well as being on the autism spectrum, I have OCD.  It's hard to tell which of my sensory things come from which, and it's likely that some of what I'm describing in this post is a consequence of each.

It's really hard to know what anyone else's sensory experience is like, and honestly, I'm not at all sure I entirely know what mine is like.  However, I do get the impression that mine is rather different from the way neurotypicals experience the world, and that the ways it is different are perhaps interesting.

A lot of the time, my senses sort of feel like a penumbra of my mind is expanding to fill a space, and feeling out its edges.  I see a surface and feel its texture like I'm pushed up against it, even if it's meters away.  When I see things that aren't arranged right, or that are ajar, they push up against my mind until I fix them: I can't just ignore them once I know they're there, and just looking away doesn't make them vanish.  (To be clear, I don't think this is synthesia: I'm not experiencing other sensations as touch, "touch" is just the closest word I can find for "feel like they're pressing against my mind".)

As a consequence of this, I've had to learn to avoid looking at things that I expect to look wrong to me.  People with facial piercings--unfortunately very common in the trans community--are an example of this.  If I see the piercing I'll feel it pushing up against me for half an hour or so, so I need to avoid seeing their face so it won't hit me.  Likewise, things that I know are disordered in painful ways, but that I can't order, I'll do my best to look around, if I can.

Although I've been focusing on visual things, it's not just them; it particularly can happen with sound as well.  And I think the best way to understand sensory overload for me is that even if my mind is pressing up against my surroundings, it's still connected to a limited and fleshy brain that can't handle so much input.  Being in a familiar, closed-in, quiet environment where things don't seem to change can be a big help for this, because there's a lot less new surroundings for my mind to go exploring and keeping track of.

To be clear, this isn't always unpleasant.  It's also how stimming works for me a lot of the time: some feelings on my mind feel really good, and it's nice to be able to relax my mind by letting it bathe in them.  It also seems to be related to what it feels like to hyperfocus on some of my special interests, especially maps.  I feel like I'm reaching out with my mind and, instead of taking in sensory stimuli, taking in facts and information and spacial arrangements of things.  It can be an almost rapturous feeling of oneness with whatever I'm focusing on, which I'm not sure I can really usefully describe to anyone who hasn't experienced it.

I think that that feeling is something other autistic people experience in the context of their special interests: in particular, I'm thinking of reading John Elder Robeson's descriptions of how he looks at electronic circuits and "sees" how they will operate.  As I think I've said before, one of my dreams, which I don't think I can ever achieve--I'm not convinced it's humanly possible--but which I would love to be able to do, is to be able to "see" a whole city in that way: to just spread my mind over it and understand how it's arranged.

I attended my first seder ever last night, as a guest of ashnistrike and her family. It was a wonderful experience, though I suspect that had more to do with feeling like I was part of a community and being surrounded by wonderful friends who made it a beautiful, geeky, and sometimes hilarious evening, than with the specific fact it was a seder. (As a crypto-goy who wasn't raised in the vicinity of Judaism; Passover doesn't have particular emotional resonances for me.)

Besides the normal confusion of participating in a new ritual and new holiday for the first time, it was an interesting feeling to not understand most of the ritual phrases and prayers because they were in Hebrew.  It reminded me a little of attending Mass at Our Lady, Queen of Apostles in Hamtramck, MI with my mom and sometimes with my grandma when my family visited my Polish grandparents for Easter.  It's not that the Masses weren't in English--there were Polish Masses, of course, but I didn't get taken to them--but just that the priest had a thick Polish accent and I couldn't understand his sing-song voice enough to make out a lot of the words.  This time, though, there was a haggadah with translations of all the Hebrew bits, so I could find out what was being said, even if I couldn't understand it.

I got there early enough to help with a bit of cooking, including making deviled eggs, though I wasn't able to help that much with the huge amount of prep that went into it. Shortly after I got there, there was a bit of panic over whether the hard-boiled eggs were leavened, because they came out of the shells falling apart, and the internet told us this was probably because they were very fresh (they were from a CSA) and still had carbon dioxide that hadn't come out of solution. Fortunately, we were able to argue that they were permissible because carbonated drinks are, and that they were in fact in the process of approaching a state of perfect flatness, unlike leavened things, which are in the process of becoming less flat with time.

During the cooking, there was a determination that it was permissible for N. to supervise her own baking of matzoh because she is a middle school teacher, and as a teacher, she is inherently a rabbi and thus qualified to supervise the dough to make sure it only is wet for eighteen minutes. On the other hand, ashnistrike, who has a PhD and has taught college classes, is a more senior rabbi. Later, during the seder, after she told us the story of the Oven of Akhnai, we concluded that the God of the Torah isn't a rabbi, because he is in fact not a good teacher: he just handed the Torah to the Jews and told them to figure it out without help.

During the seder, nineweaving told us about a seder she attended in Prague, which was held in Czech, meaning that the word "slaves" was "robotu". Later, we read a poem that Jo Walton once wrote in response to hearing about this, called "When we were robots in Egypt."

I think that everyone attending the seder who wasn't Jewish was pagan, and some people were both. This led to some interesting conversations, including an extended side discussion during the seder about the identity and cleanliness of an idol of Aphrodite that was in the kitchen sink because, when the oven was replaced, it was noted that it needed cleaning. It's probably just as well that there were apparently no Christians present, since we also got into a discussion of Jesus of Nazareth having been an arsehole.

Also during the seder, the hosts' household has a tradition in which, after describing the 10 plagues visited on the Egyptians in Exodus, they list out modern plagues, and after singing about the things that were done for the Israelites when they left Egypt, they list modern things to be thankful for. The list of modern plagues included "fascism," "the patriarchy," and so forth. The modern things people were thankful for included modern medicine, librarians, memory, resistance, and so on.

A number of the readings from the seder also really spoke to me, including a short passage about Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian Jewish woman who had fled to Palestine and then returned to Hungary as a special forces paratrooper to fight the Nazis, who eventually captured and executed her. There was also a poem by her,
that I thought was beautiful.  Afterward, we read "Zog Nit Keyn Mol," a song written by a partisan in the Vilnius Ghetto after hearing about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  There were also some beautiful readings of poems by Marge Piercy: the two I can find online are "Maggid" and "The Cup of Eliyahu."

Despite the fact that--as I mentioned at the start of this post--I'm not actually Jewish, my history of being a crypto-goy continues. Several of the attendees who I hadn't met before told me they were very surprised when I implied I wasn't Jewish, because I acted and looked very Jewish. Also, when I clarified at one point that I hadn't said I was Ashkenazi, ashnistrike pointed out that Ashkenazi is in fact the specific sort of Jewish that I'm not, as an ethnically Polish-Catholic American.

People also told me that I looked incredibly androgynous, and were surprised that I was able to stay closeted at work if I dressed the same way there (I do). This made me incredibly happy, though I still find it deeply hard to believe.

Finally, given Passover's significance as a beginning-of-spring festival, it struck me as very appropriate that today, I noticed for the first time that the flowering pear tress that grow all over my area had suddenly come into bloom.

I really should manage to write here more--or at all--but I can't say I've managed much of the sort of writing that should go here lately.  The last few days' events deserve a mention, though.

Like most of the East Coast, the DC area had a massive wind storm--gusts up to 70 mph (110 km/hr)--all day Friday and into Saturday.  My apartment lost power on Friday morning, and it wasn't restored until Sunday morning.  This also means that my relatively drafty apartment had no heat.  Fortunately, some friends who live nearby have a guest bedroom and were able to take me in.  I really appreciate it, and also feel a little guilty for accepting their hospitality when I feel like I'm not capable of reciprocating: my apartment doesn't really have much space for guests.

Dinner on Friday night with the family I was staying with--a found family of six adults, three kids, and four dogs--was particularly notable.  It was the first time I'd ever been present when Shabbos candles were lit, and for some reason it touched me a bit more than I expected.  I'm still trying to put together why: my partner Jan pointed out that Christians say grace before meals, and in fact I've had to participate in that with relatives many times, and I've found it uncomfortable.  Why this seemed different, I don't know.  It may be because this time it was with people I actually really like, or because in this case it was something their family does occasionally on special occasions, and not just an everyday thing.

I think, also, that part of why I liked it is that ritual meals feel like a very important ritual practice to me.  Although I will never participate in the Mystery of the Eucharist, one thing I really appreciate about it is the idea of the whole congregation--and really, the whole Church--sharing in a meal.  I very much want to include group meals, shared both with friends and with the gods, in my ritual practice, though figuring out how to do so is harder when I still don't have a good solution for offering disposal.  But I think that seeing the Shabbos candles really hit me because of that, and I'm really glad I was offered the chance to participate in.

As many of you have gathered, I am--among other things--a Hellenic pagan.  However, I'm certainly not a Reconstructionist, though I do follow some of their blogs because their research is interesting.  I tend to believe that the gods are basis sets constructed by the human mind out of the incomprehensibility of the Ocean and Fire, with the implication that the gods are partly culturally constructed.

Since the ancient Greek religion--and all historical pagan religions--was an inseparable component of a deeply problematic culture that, among other things, was horribly misogynistic, I can't accept it in its historical form.  However, I do think there is merit to the myths and lore, and I've recently been thinking about alternate--largely queerer--interpretations of stories that present the goddesses in problematic ways.  It turns out I can't even manage being a non-heretical pagan.


Athena, Hera, and the Judgement of Paris

Athena's and Hera's support of the Argives in the Trojan War is usually explained as their vengeance for being spurned by Paris, who chose to give the golden apple labeled "for the fairest" to Aphrodite in exchange for the love of (or right to abduct) Helen, the wife of the king of Sparta and most beautiful woman in the world.

However, we should keep in mind that, in selecting Aphrodite's offer, Paris rejected Hera's offer of kingship and Athena's of wisdom and martial prowess for a gift that offended both their basic natures.

Hera is the guardian of marriage and the family, and of royal authority.  It is enough that she opposes Paris because he asked for a gift that would break a marriage, insult a king, and that he knew would bring all the Argives together in war against his father's kingdom.  (Recall that all the Argive kings had sworn an oath to overthrow anyone who stole Helen away from whichever husband she chose.)

Athena is the guardian of the polis--the city, but also the community--as well as the patron of victory and martial skill.  Paris's request for Helen knowingly brought war and destruction to the community that as prince he had a responsibility to protect.  Furthermore, he is shown in the Iliad to be a physical coward, and unwilling to fight while his brother Hector coordinates the city's defenses against the enemy he provoked.

Given these crimes, it is self-evident that both goddesses would have to oppose Paris.


Athena and Zeus

Athena is often incorrectly described as having been born of Zeus alone, with no mother.  In fact, she was born of Metis, who Zeus impregnated before learning--from Prometheus, who delayed telling him until he had impregnated her--that she was fated to bear a son greater than his father.  Zeus devoured Metis whole--like his father Kronos, who had devoured his young to keep them from overthrowing him--but she gave birth to him inside his head, and Hephaestus had to break Zeus's head open to release her.

The fact that her birth involved the (temporary) decapitation of Zeus--Zeus's father and grandfather were deposed by decapitation and castration--as well as the fact that the Homeric hymn depicting her birth presents her as born fully armed, causing earthquakes, and causing all the gods, including Zeus, to shake where they stood, until she took off her armor, leads me to an interesting suspicion.

The common assumption is that Zeus got lucky and Metis's first and only child was a daughter, not the son who would overthrow his father.  However, I suspect that Athena is intersex and non-binary and, in a patriarchal and binarist society, able to choose either gender role as it suits her.  By taking off her armor, she announced an intent to live as a woman for now, posing no threat to Zeus and, in fact, becoming his favorite child.  However, she holds over him the threat that she could choose to live as a man and depose him, as she is fated to do, if he oversteps acceptable behavior.

This, I think, explains Zeus's favoritism toward Athena, and his willingness to trust her with the Aegis.  He knows that she alone among the gods can overthrow him, and so he wants to stay on her best side and doesn't need to fear her taking advantage of him: if she chooses to overthrow him it will be open rebellion, not deception and treason.


Athena and Hephaestus

Athena and Hephaestus have a complicated relationship in the Hellenic lore.  The Greeks certainly recognized a parallelism between them: they were both seen as patrons of the practical arts, and while Athena was seen as Hephaestus's superior (partly for ableist) reasons, they were honored together at shared shrines and festivals in many cities, including Athens.

There are a couple of stories that are usually presented as Hephaestus attempting to rape Athena, however: they involve him ejaculating on her thigh when she resists him penetrating her, possibly after they have been married and are together in their marriage bed.  The fact that the stories sometimes claim they had just been married, and the fact that she never seems to show any distrust or dislike for him in other myths, as might be expected if he was a rapist seems odd.  Furthermore, unlike the other male gods, I've never heard of Hephaestus being presented as a rapist in any other context.

This, along with my previous conclusion that Athena is non-binary and probably intersex, leads me to suspect that Athena and Hephaestus's encounter was consensual, but broke off because she had a dysphoric breakdown.  Athena is not a virgin because of an obsession with purity, but because her dysphoria is inconsistent with sex.

At the same time, this helps explain Hephaestus's rather odd marriage to Aphrodite--his proposal was "I work nights."--in which she seems to sleep with everyone but her husband, and he only objects once, when Ares makes fun of him in front of the other gods for being a cuckold and he sets a trap of an unbreakable net for the lovers so he can hold them up to be laughed at by the gods.  But his objection seems to more be Ares' public scorn than Aphrodite's unfaithfulness.

My theory is that Athena and Hephaestus are a celibate romantic couple: they don't have sex because of body image and dysphoria issues, which makes their attempted marriage invalid in the eyes of the other gods.  Hephaestus marries Aphrodite as a marriage of convenience: it allows him to appear married (and thus respectable) to the other gods, who tend to not take him seriously as a man because of his disability.  And it provides Aphrodite cover as a "married woman" to have constant affairs without her husband minding.  This only breaks down when Ares ridicules Hephaestus and forces him to do something to regain the other gods' respect.


Artemis

Artemis is also traditionally portrayed as a virgin goddess, but I think it's important to recognize that the Greeks probably wouldn't have understood sex that didn't involve putting a penis in someone.  Given her association with woman followers who she insists remain virgins, I sort of suspect her of being a radical feminist lesbian.  Her role as the goddess responsible for death in childbirth may relate to her disapproval of heterosexuality, while her role as a moon goddess suggests some potential connection to female sexuality.

That said, it is clear that Artemis doesn't hate men: she is a loving sister to Apollo, and I believe she is occasionally a patron to male heroes.


Hestia

Hestia is often not counted as an Olympian, and in some stories is said to have given up her seat at their meeting table for a place by the hearth.  She is also--like the Vedic god Agni--portrayed as the personification of the ritual and sacrificial fire, and she traditionally received the first sacrifice when offerings were made.  Though it is frequently forgotten, she is the second-oldest of the Olympians, as the oldest of Kronos's six children.  (Aphrodite was born of the sea and Oranos's severed genitals when Kronos overthrew him.)  

Hestia seems rather separate from the other gods, and from mortals as well: she cares deeply about her domain, the hearth and home.  My reading of her is as an aromantic asexual who may also be autistic: she would rather sit on a soft cotton mat by the fire alone than participate in the gods' feuding and arguments.  Meanwhile, she plays an essential role if anyone is paying attention: she keeps the essential, everyday functioning of the home and of Olympus running while the others are off having adventures and often being irresponsible.


Hera and Zeus 

Hera's marriage to Zeus is definitely strange.  They are virtually never portrayed as lovers, or even as particularly liking each other: instead, the most common stories about them involve Hera plotting to overthrow Zeus, or else Zeus taking lovers and Hera smiting them.  This is particularly interesting given that Hera is the patron of marriage and order in the family: things which Zeus seems to constantly desecrate.

Why does Hera stay with Zeus?  A traditional answer would be that she has no choice: a woman couldn't traditionally demand a divorce--especially as her father is dead, slain by Zeus--and besides, the patron of marriage wouldn't do that.  My slightly modified reading is that she stays married to Zeus because he is such a horrible husband.  Leaving him would, in a way, be letting him win.  Instead, she takes an active role in enforcing his marriage vows, providing a check on the chief of the gods, and reminding others that there will be consequences for breaking them.  (Though, unfortunately, her enforcement seems to mostly fall on the heads of his not-always-voluntary mortal partners.)

While I should have been sleeping, I came up with what I think is an interesting--but deeply heretical--interpretation of some bits of Catholic theology.  The basic premise is that Mary, not Jesus, is the Messiah, but neither of them is God.

This interpretation begins with a significant reinterpretation of the nature of the Fall.  Traditionally, the Fall is understood as solely a matter of sin and punishment: Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and so they were cast out of Eden, became mortal, and cursed to reproduce but have this sin and its consequences passed on to their offspring.  At the same time, though, the nature of the universe seems to have been changed by the Fall: the post-Eden world is harsher, even for animals, than Eden was, and predation and other sources of pain enter the world universally.

My theory is that the Fall had two components, only one of which was punishment.  As shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with my theological tastes, I have my doubts about a personal God being a universal creator.  However, it is more reasonable to imagine him as the creator of humanity.  God was constrained to act in--and created intelligent life in--a universe in which entropy and natural selection had already established that life would be a painful struggle.  Eden can be understood as a sort of benevolent hallucination: a false consciousness God created to allow Adam and Eve to remain innocent of the pain of life.

When Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they did sin and that sin was heritable, but the appearance of mortality and a more painful universe were not punishment.  Rather, they came to know the true nature of the universe in which they had been created, and could no longer be kept in the nursery of Eden.  Their entry into the real world brought with it the consequences we associate with Original Sin, which may be thought of as a sort of adolescent rebellion, caused by a desire to return to the comfort of Eden without giving up their new freedom to exist within the real world.

This means that humanity's sinful nature was in part psychological damage that needed healing, but the fundamental impermanence and pain of life are not things God has the power to repeal, as they are part of the nature of a universe that predates God's creation, which we--and God--are powerless to completely eliminate.

Where does the New Testament drama come into this, then?  In my interpretation, its fundamental event--its crux of history--is neither the Incarnation (which is denied) nor the Crucifixion (which is reinterpreted), but rather the Immaculate Conception.  Mary was a human being, born of human parents, just like all of us.  However, she was miraculously conceived without Original Sin; without the fundamental angst over the loss of Eden that humanity inherited from Adam and Eve.

Why does Mary's Immaculate Conception matter?  Because she fills a role as a foster-mother for all of humanity, acting as a substitute for the corrupted inheritance of sin and an unresolvable sense of loss over an Eden we cannot return to that humanity inherited from Adam and Eve.  Although she is fully human in nature, she is conceived without this inherent sin and sense of loss, but instead with an acceptance and understanding of the knowledge Adam and Eve gained from the fruit of the Tree inherent in her soul.  By accepting her as their spiritual parent, all humans can receive this gift.

What role does Jesus and the virgin birth have, then?  Jesus is not God any more than--and if anything, is less God than--Mary is.  He is instead a prophet and a symbolic everyman figure.  If Mary is humanity's spiritual foster-mother, then Jesus is a symbol of what we can be.  Mary's parentage of humanity is adoptive and spiritual, not physical, thus her perpetual virginity.  However, her miraculous conception and birth of Jesus allows him to be her descendant alone, and a representative of what humans can be if they accept her lineage in place of the corrupted lineage of Adam and Eve.

Jesus's life and teachings, then, are intended to be understood as a model of how humans should live under the new dispensation.  The message of the Crucifixion is not a blood sacrifice, or a victory over death.  Instead, it is a reminder and a warning that the world as it actually is is still a place of pain and, inevitably, death.  Even a true son of Mary Immaculate must face and accept that he will die, and that the consequences of his efforts to live a good life may be an unpleasant and ignominious death.

This theology rejects the Ascension of Jesus into Heaven in favor of an Assumption in the manner of his mother's eventual Assumption.  Both Mary and Jesus are human, and fated to die but, after their deaths, they are bodily Assumed into Heaven to be Queen and Prince of Heaven, that they may continue to serve as moral guides and sources of strength for humanity.

Naturally, this interpretation contradicts a number of things in the New Testament; the best explanation of this that I can give is that the New Testament was written by men entrenched in the Patriarchy and in their culture who misinterpreted much of what they were seeing and hearing.

Some of you know that I've occasionally described my parents as "living several social classes below their income".  This isn't entirely accurate, but it definitely feel like they don't fit into any of the "standard" American social classes that the media likes to talk about and portray.  Figuring out what my class background growing up was has been tricky for me, because it seems like my family didn't have much in common with those of people I knew in high school, or in college, or in grad school.

That said, while I was at MIT, I started to recognize that my childhood environment wasn't sui generis: there were certainly other people in Cambridge who seemed to be rather similar.  I think I first came to this realization the one time I attended Christmas Revels' "Riversing" event: a vaguely "civic pagan" folksinging Fall Equinox gathering on the Charles in Cambridge.  I am coming to believe that my mother's social class---and to a large degree, the background I was raised in---is a small but broadly distributed subculture/subclass that exists among roughly-middle-class (and some poorer), largely white Americans.

I don't have a name for this class, and don't know if it has one, but I'd very much appreciate suggestions, and comments from anyone who thinks they recognize it among people they know, particularly themselves and their families.  For now, I'm attempting to extrapolate it from my mother and a few other people of her generation I know or know of: Jane, the mother of my best friend growing up; Barbara, the mother of my friend The Bird; possibly the mothers of my friends Jan and Niphada, and Betsy, who I know through the Medieval Grad Student.  

Traits that seem to be correlated with this class, at least in my mind:

• A very strong focus on education and being well-read for their own sake, rather than seeing education as primarily a means to social status or a higher income.
  • Tendency to have lots of books around, and perhaps limiting both their kids' and their own use of TV and video games because they "rot the brain".
  • Not playing the "college admissions game" of the upper-middle class.  I never took any sort of SAT prep classes or went through the other rituals of trying to impress colleges that most of my classmates at Caltech and MIT went through if their families could afford them.
  • Being more fine with academic outside interests / tending to want to read about everything, rather than focusing on knowledge that's useful or professionally relevant.
  • All but one of my mom and her five siblings ended up being teachers or librarians.
• If religious, they're religious in non-traditional, generally more eclectic/liberal/ecumenical ways.  A certain sort of what I call "civic paganism" is at least tolerated by them.
  • The "civic paganism" I have in mind includes the town May Day festivals my mom took me to in towns we otherwise never visited, the Greenbelt "Green Man" festival, and Riversing and Revels in general in Boston.  It's often tied to environmentalism.
  • This group does seem to have an over-representative number of people from Jewish or Catholic backgrounds.  Jan suggests there may be an immigrant connection.
  • If not religious, tend to still care about some of the ritual/festival trappings of their childhood religious background.
• Identify as politically liberal, though usually not far-left-radical: more likely to identify as liberal democrats or socialists, but unlikely to be communists or anarchists.
  • Likely to go to protests / participate in boycotts / etc.
  • Particularly anti-big-corporation stance, and likely to be pro-union even if they aren't in a union or at a job level that is usually unionized.
  • Think the world has serious problems that need to be fixed, but also comfortable with a number of things they don't want to change, unlike the more "burn it all down" positions of some of my more left-wing friends.
• Relatively gender-non-conforming, but not ostentatiously so.
  • Ignore gender norms they don't care for, but not enough so to be read as visibly queer.
  • Women tend to not wear makeup much, and wear little jewelry, usually things with symbolic significance, either personal or political/religious.
  • Men don't seem to care that strongly about sports / don't fit into standard American masculinity in other ways.
• Despite the above, a noticeable tendency toward stay-at-home mothers.
  • I think this is related to the strong focus on education.  "Education is so important I want to be sure I have the time to make sure my kids' are educated properly."  Examples of this include my mom's spending a huge amount of time focusing on my schoolwork when I was in grade school, and her insistently teaching me phonics (well after I learned to read) because she thought it was the "right way to learn" and the school wasn't using it.  Also, Jane homeschooling bother her kids, after having sent them to a Montessori school for a couple of years.
  • A tendency to return to the workforce, in ways that don't necessarily make economic sense / seem economically necessary after kids grow up.  My mom substitute-teaches (see, teaching!) even though it leaves her exhausted and my parents don't need the money.  Barbara went back to college for a BS in civil engineering (her first was in physics) and became an environmental engineer.
• Very community-involved, though not necessarily that interested in leadership roles, other than "well, if absolutely no one else is willing to do things."
  • My mom and Jane are involved in a bunch of community organizations that otherwise consist of women a generation older than them, and have ended up helping run them (Garden Club, Friends of the Library).
  • Go to civic events, and attend debates in municipal elections that almost no one attends.
• I think there's also a bit of a tendency towards selective old-fashionedness, whether about cooking (not owning a microwave, doing things from scratch no one else does), communications (not owning a TV or cell phone, not having cable), or something else.

This essay, titled "The Revolutionary Art of Hearth-Keeping," was brought to my attention about a month ago by a blog I occasionally follow.  I've been wanting to write up my thoughts on it for some time, but I've had a very busy month, between travel and the start of a new semester, and I haven't managed to get writing done.  So here's a rather overdue response:

Parts of this post certainly spoke to me.  In particular, the idea that cooking and providing emotional support for the people on the front lines can be  an important part of activism, too.  A lot of my friends have been really involved in activism since the catastrophe last November, but it's something that I'm mostly just not able to do.  I don't have a personality that can handle it: I find the very idea of going to protests stressful, and rarely have any spoons to spare these days as it is.

My friends have been trying to emphasize to me that I shouldn't feel guilty, because I'm providing emotional support for people who actually are going out and doing things and, well, maybe my role is to make pierogi for the revolution.  Which, honestly, appeals to me a lot more, even if it's hard for me to find time or energy to actively do things of that nature rather than just being there for my friends in general.

At the same time, though, I'm kind of put off by the author's focus on tribalism and inherited community traditions.  For me, at least, this sort of strength has always come from developing my own traditions, and creating my own community: I'm a bit distrustful of inherited family and community, and I certainly don't have one of my own that I fit in.  But, as a friend recently told me, when I was commenting as usual that I'm not really part of the queer community, "Don't worry about it: you've made your own queer community, and it's the best."

I may not have an inherited community, but my efforts to build one by inviting friends over for Polish food, and by trying to introduce people who I think should know each other haven't been in vain and, to some degree, I've managed to build some communities in which I have a bit of a hearth-keeper role.  If only I had the time and energy to actually do what it would take to keep them as strong and sturdy as I wish they were: that, unfortunately, is probably a full-time job.

Keeping this in mind, and recognizing that there is at least some connection between this part of my identity and my strong feelings about the sacredness of place, I should maybe make more of an effort to incorporate deities of the hearth into my practice.  Given my largely Hellenic-inspired practice, Hestia would be an obvious focus for this.  She is traditionally understood as the sacrificial fire itself, and when burnt offerings are made, the first is always to her.  However, I've never found a practical way to do burnt offerings--a problem for Hellenic-inspired practice in general--and so I perhaps need to think of a different way to honor her.

For reasons that were largely (okay, entirely) ashnistrike's doing, I got to be on a panel on speculative fiction "Beyond the Binary" at Outwrite, a convention-ish thing about LGBT writing at the DC LGBT center along with her and wolby. I was fairly terrified beforehand, given that I haven't read that much SF compared to other people, and given that I'm not a writer and it was a panel full of writers, but it seems to have gone quite well. I got the impression that my comments were useful and reasonably coherent (even the attempt to explain Charlie Stross' novel Glasshouse really quickly so I could explain my complicated feels about it and gender), though I'm sad that I afterward realized I failed to give my pronouns as "'she' in the Radchii sense" and to mention the short story "Revolution in 1950," by Stanley Weinbaum, which might be the first science fiction story ever to deal with the issue of medical transition.

Other cool things at Outwrite included that I managed to write a poem---my first that didn't feel horribly cliched in nearly a year---during the panel before the one I was on. I've posted it on Facebook; if you don't follow me there but are interested, let me know and I can send a link. And after my panel, someone from the audience came up and introduced themselves as a high school acquaintance who had also turned out to be trans, so that was cool. The weird consequences of being back in the DC area, I suppose.

And, after the convention was over, I had dinner with wolby, ashnistrike, and their families.  That was really cool and involved discussions of transit, religion, science fiction and fantasy, dinosaurs (and people who identify as such), and kitties.

Finally, I came up with the phrase "From broth we came, and to brine we shall return," and now need to figure out how to use it somehow. Possibly in a liturgy for something. Or a poem, though my chances of ever making "Cape Ann" (my most recent horribly cliched poem, which it could almost fit the theme of) into anything tolerable feel pretty low.

A fundamental problem with my gender identity, and related things, is that I don’t really understand what gender is. I imagine this is less of a concern for binary trans people: if you know that you’re “a man” or “a woman” and mean by it roughly what everyone else does, the details of what exactly it means to be “a man” or “a woman” may be less of a concern. But a lot of my worrying about whether I’m “really trans” or what it’s valid for me to think of my gender as seems to really come from the fact that it’s hard for me to figure out what categories I can validly put myself in.

I (think) I know my body, and what I want it to be. Basically, mostly female except no periods, and being able to pee standing is kind of useful. And very small breasts. I’m even pretty happy with how close I can get to this, except for my hair loss. And I can mostly do it without coming out and having to deal with all the risks that entails. I do have some worries about how much of my discomfort of my genitals may come from hatred of the fact that my penis is circumcised, rather than “natural” dysphoria, but the fact that taking testosterone-blockers and estrogen has helped a decent amount is encouraging.

But I have no real idea what to call this. I’ve been considering “eunuch”, given that my main plan seems to be chemical and eventually physical castration. And I used to go with “neutrois,” but besides the fact no one knows the word, I’m increasingly unconvinced I’d really be happy with no genitals, even if I wish I would be.

I don’t understand gender roles. This wouldn’t be such an issue if I also didn’t care about gender roles. The problem is that, on some level, I seem to. It makes me really uncomfortable to be thought of, or think I might be thought of, as “a man”. At the same time, though, I’m pretty worried that I might be “being a man” in terms of behavior or gender roles I participate in. This particularly bothers me because I think a lot of my discomfort with the idea of “being a man” comes from being really uncomfortable with male-coded behaviors and roles.

Basically, I know that I don’t perform femininity, or have much interest in doing so. I’d like to believe that I don’t perform either gender, but that’s obviously false. For one thing, almost everything is coded with the gender binary, and a lot of my behaviors—especially ones related to presentation and appearance—fit fairly well into society’s “male” category. It’s made worse by the fact that I am choosing to present as male professionally to avoid difficulties with employability and safety and such. Anyway, what this amounts to is that I feel like I do experience a large amount of male privilege, and probably do set off many non-male people’s discomfort-with-male-people, so I feel like it is problematic for me to identify too strongly as not-male. I appreciate the fact that my friends largely recognize me as clearly not a man, but I’m not convinced I can describe myself as such to society at large, or even to those segments of society I’d be comfortable doing so with.

I certainly don’t understand relationships or dating or sexuality. My issues with them are definitely tied into gender, given that until recently I identified as asexual for reasons that were mostly due to dysphoria about my genitals. The way I think about relationships and sex still has a concerning amount of connection to gender roles in it, and it’s really important for me to be “female” with respect to any sort of relationship or sex I might ever have. But this is really its own topic.

For all my confusing interactions with gender and sexuality, I think that it’s pretty ambiguous that I count as “queer” or “LGBT” or whatever your term of choice is. That said, I’ve never really felt like the LGBT community was something I could identify with. I’m not entirely sure why this is. Part of it is probably because, by the time I realized I was bi and trans, I’d been burnt badly enough times by identifying with things that I’ve developed an aversion to trusting any community or “official” identity.

I think there’s more to it than that, though. My life has never really followed the “standard” LGBT narratives. I’ve largely chosen to stay in closets so I can be treated as “normal” by society at large. I’ve never dated or had sex with anyone of any gender, so regardless of my theoretical bisexuality, the whole focus on “love” and sexuality that a lot of the community seems to have has never seemed relevant to me. And, well, my attempts to be involved in the LGBT groups in grad school seemed to fail because everyone was either an undergrad much younger than me or else mostly just interested in gay bars and drag shows. (I know some people find drag shows empowering; I just find them triggering.)

So, I don’t know what this means, or how much I should care about not feeling part of the community. I think I largely have enough identity other places, and I do at least feel some connection to other trans people. But I just don’t really identify with rainbows.