Category Archives: life

What’s wrong with some encouragement every now and then?

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Believe in yourself (click to embiggen)
Believe in yourself (click to embiggen)
I made a disparaging remark about myself the other day, and my friend, Jeri Lynn declared, “Stop making fun of my friend Gene!” Which turned into a brief discussion of the differences between the way we treat other people, the things we will put up with other people saying about our friends and loved ones, and the ways we treat ourselves.

It also made me think of a conversation I had a week or so earlier where one of my friends made a comment about people who never seem to like anything. It’s a phenomenon I see all the time: someone claims to be a Doctor Who fan, let’s say, but they never, ever seem to have anything good to say about any episode of the show we discuss. Never. It makes one wonder why they keep watching, right?

I know I criticize all sorts of things. Particularly real world things, such as the current spate of laws trying to ban trans people from public bathrooms. And I can go on a bit of a rant about the poor storytelling choices that certain studios seem to be making because they completely misunderstand why some of their rivals are making money hand-over-fist with a similar type of movie.

It’s easy, sometimes, to rant about things that aren’t working or to raise awareness on things that are causing problems for people we care about. In the course of all that advocacy against various injustices and heartaches, it can be hard to remember that there’s a lot of good in our lives. And sometimes that good is entangled in the bad.

This is the whole reason I set myself a goal a while back about decreasing my outrage. And then gave myself the specific task of setting myself a minimum number of posts each month that will just be about things I like. Most months I made that goal. I missed it last month. I will place some of the blame on Camp NaNoWriMo and some of the blame on the unexpected death in the family (and the fallout therefrom) and let it go. Just as it isn’t good to rant about bad things all the time, it isn’t good to berate myself for missing an arbitrary goal every now and then.

There are a lot of really cool people in my life. I’ve had the joy of reading and watching a lot of good storytelling during the last year or so. I’m looking forward to quite a bit more. This Friday we’re going to see the new Captain America movie with some friends. The week after that we’re attending EverfreeNW, where I expect to see a lot of wonderful and happy people enthusing about a kids’ cartoon series. The same weekend I’m attending a musical (The Mystery of Edwin Drood) with a couple of friends, and watching a very talented and awesome teen-ager of my acquaintance playing one of the roles. Next month we’re attending the Locus Awards weekend (my first time) which I expect will be fun (it includes a banquet where one of my favorite authors will be MC-ing, a bunch of books and stories will receive awards, and there’s an Aloha Shirt competition! What could be sillier and cooler than that?).

Flowers are blooming all over my neighborhood. People are writing interesting stories, drawing cute and wonderful art—and we get to read and look at a bunch of it!

I’ve been trying to remind myself, whenever I look at a web comic, or a posted story, or even just a cute observation on someone’s tumblr, to click the “Like” or “♡” (heart) or “✩” (star) or whatever option the particular web service gives us for telling the person who posted it that we appreciated it. Because posting things takes time and effort. And if it made us chuckle, or nod in agreement, or smile, or just feel a little less worried about things even for a moment, we should let the person know.

Because it isn’t easy for some people to believe in themselves. And they don’t always have a friend sitting nearby to come to their defense when they feel discouraged.

Confessions of an absent-minded misplacer

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"Oh no! I forgot something, but what?"
“Oh no! I forgot something, but what?”
Many years ago, after we had been living together for a few years, someone at a social function asked what the first thing we had ever argued about had been. We looked at each other for a few seconds, and one of us said, “I can’t think of anything,” while the other asked more-or-less simultaneously, “Have we ever had an argument?” And the person who asked the question didn’t believe us. One of the other people argued that we couldn’t possibly be a real couple if we’d never had an argument. Which is what prompted me to say, “Well, he does get aggravated at me when I lose my keys. Or my wallet. Or my glasses—” And he interrupted to say, “That’s not an argument! You’re never angry at me when you lose stuff. You’re always angry at yourself.”

And one of the others said, “There we go! See, now you’re disagreeing about whether that was an argument! I knew it wasn’t possible for people to live together and never disagree!”

Which caused both of us to explain that a disagreement isn’t an argument. An argument is a usually heated or angry exchange of opposing views with the intent to prove the other person wrong. We disagree about all sorts of things, but we discuss things amiably. And usually we wind up, as we explain our thoughts to each other: either talking ourselves into agreeing, or both realizing we already agree about the big topic and only have a niggle on a side issue, or both coming to the conclusion that either position is a valid one, and each of us have picked one side mostly for reasons of emotion or as a matter of preference.

One of the people at the table shook his head and said, “You guys have no frickin’ idea how a relationship is supposed to work!” And walked away. I think that since we just passed the 19th anniversary of our first date, still living together, and both seem to still be pretty happy about it, that maybe we have at least a notion.

I do get very, very upset when I lose things. And my poor husband has to put up with it while I’m rushing around the house, looking underneath things while I mutter and grumble ever more angrily. Then he tries to calmly work around me, methodically checking more carefully all of places where I might have set my keys down while I was fetching the travel mug I wanted to take with me… Continue reading Confessions of an absent-minded misplacer →

Confessions of a bad son

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Myths about violence, #3: "Children need their father even if he is abusive. Fact: Children need a safe, non-violent environment in order to feel secure and thrive. They are often relieved when the violent relationship ends."
Myths about violence, #3: “Children need their father even if he is abusive. Fact: Children need a safe, non-violent environment in order to feel secure and thrive. They are often relieved when the violent relationship ends.” (Click to embiggen)
One of my earlier childhood memories is being scolded by my mother and grandmother for not being excited about going with my dad to do some errands. I was 3 or 4 years old. The thrust of both scoldings was that I should be grateful that Dad wanted to spend some time with me at all, and didn’t I realize that being nice to Dad might make him less likely to be mean to me? I hadn’t wanted to go with him because I could never remember a time that I wasn’t afraid to be alone with him. I reluctantly agreed to pretend to be excited to spend time with him, but only because I was afraid of what he might do if I didn’t please him. Nothing terrible happened on that particular trip.

Contrast this with my first memory of a hospital emergency room. It was about a year later and I was 4 or 5 years old. I had lost consciousness after Dad smacked me around because I had cried when one of his friends that were attending a barbecue in our back yard had scared me. Later, after I woke up, one of the other adults (I think it was one of the wives who was refraining from alcohol so my mother, who was very pregnant at the time, wouldn’t be the only one sober) had realized that I wasn’t kidding when I said there was something wrong with my eyes. The others were eventually convinced that I needed to be taken to a hospital. During the ride to the emergency room, Dad drilled me with the story that I had been running around in the dark playing hide and seek and had climbed somewhere I shouldn’t have, I had been surprised when someone shone a bright light in my eyes, so I fell down and landed on my head. It was made very clear that if I did not stick to this story, not only would I get an even more severe beating when I got home, but that my mother would also suffer… Continue reading Confessions of a bad son →

I love walking

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Siberian Lynx © San Diego Zoo.
Siberian Lynx © San Diego Zoo.
I was first diagnosed as pre-diabetic about 14 years ago. Having seen so many relatives (mostly on Dad’s side of the family) develop adult-onset diabetes, and particularly seeing what happened to some of them who never took the diagnosis seriously, I’ve been obsessing about carbohydrates, blood sugar, and calorie-burning ever since. Now that I’m at the point where I’m actually testing my blood-sugar directly several times a day, I’ve learned that a lot of the advice my general practitioner and the nutritionist he sent me to is… well, let’s just say the advice was not based on the latest research, nor does it match what’s happening in my body day-to-day… Continue reading I love walking →

Why I hate hay fever reason #6273

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icanhascheeseburger.come
…and a cold cloth for my head, please.
I’ve written before of my frustration at being unable to distinguish a really bad hay fever day from the early stages of a head cold. Because we had such a mild winter, this was one of the years where I never got a break from hay fever. My frustration and confusion have been exacerbated by the fact that I was more or less continually sick from early January until (I hope) a bit over a week ago. What I think happened was this: I caught the virus that was going around this year making people very sick for a week or so with flu-like symptoms, then lingering for many weeks after with low key (but still annoying) symptoms. And while my immune system was bogged down fighting the virus, I got a bacterial infection in my throat, that was spreading to my sinuses by the time I went in to see the doctor and got the first prescription for an antibiotic. I got slightly better while on the antibiotic, but the throat infection surged back as soon as the pills ended, and spread to my ears before I went back to the doctor, who took more swabs to culture and put me on another, longer round of antibiotics

At the end of the second round, the sore throat came back along with a new, keep-me-up-half-the-night cough. The doctor didn’t like how my lungs sounded, so I got chest and sinus x-rays along with more swabs before the next round of a different antibiotic. And so on.

And each time I was on antibiotics, I felt better, but never completely well. Which both I and my doctor figure was probably because the original viral infection was still lingering. Except during that three month period, at least two other bouts of some sort of cold seemed to run through my office. So it’s possible that it wasn’t one long lingering viral infection, but really three or four unrelated viral infections that each hit me one after the other.

But we have also had a lot of high pollen/allergy alert days during that time. Coincidentally, some of the highest pollen count days happened to occur right after the end of each of the first two rounds of antibiotics. So each time that the sore throat and sinus symptoms started to re-occur, I told myself it was probably just allergies, and didn’t call my doctor right away.

Regardless, it’s been ten days since the end of the last round of antibiotics, with so far no sore throat and no ear ache. I think that means that the bacterial infection is finally gone. And while I’ve been having sore sinuses, congestion, and itchy eyes throughout for that entire time, nothing that isn’t very typical hay fever symptoms have shown up.

So far.

But I’m still feeling paranoid. So when I woke up feeling overheated and more congested than usual, I panicked a little. Until I remembered that because of the work being done on the exterior of the house, we’ve closed up all the windows and disabled the air-conditioning vent in the bedroom. It merely took opening the front door when I took out the garbage minutes after waking up to make me feel much more normal.

Though I had pollen alerts on my phone from both a weather app and my pollen tracker, and I see we’re going to be in the red all week. So this congestion and itchy eyes and sinus headache are probably here for the long haul.

Dang it!

Anyway, could you pass me that box of tissue, please?

A Day of Pink and the Stupidity of the Transgender Bathroom Argument

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A t-shirt proclaiming, "It's time to talk about bullying, homophobia, transphobia. Day of Pink, April 13, 2016."
Today is the Day of Pink, an International Day against Bullying, Discrimination, Homophobia, Transphobia, and Transmisogyny across the world.
I’ve been noticing a theme in the search terms bringing people to my blog lately—many variations of “stupidity of transgender bathroom argument.” Which is understandable. We have certain states falling all over themselves to pass anti-gay and anti-trans laws in the wake of the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling, and the argument which seems to get the most traction with voters (or will get a certain type of person who isn’t a reliable voter to turn out) is the argument claiming that laws protecting trans people leads to sexual predators lurking in public bathrooms. So the laws that are getting passed include specific language demanding that people use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender listed on their birth certificate, or that “matches their genitals” and so forth. Which in turn means a lot of people who want to figure out how to debunk those arguments are searching the web for an answer.

And it makes sense that some of those searches will land here, since I’ve written about this topic at least once or twice before:

Setting aside some of the other ludicrous claims, the one take away that we need to return to, again and again, is that many states and cities have had laws that specifically allow transgender people to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity, and in none of those places as there been a single documented case of someone using that law in order to try to commit a sexual assault. Not one. Which is summed up nicely in the chart below.

mediamatters.org
None of those bathroom or locker room horror stories have a basis in fact. (Click to embiggen)
This chart (which was included in one of those previous posts) is a bit over a year old. Now, in addition to the original Media Matters nice compilation of statements from law enforcement officials and other experts from the 12 states that have had laws protecting transgender people on the books for year (some going back to 1993!) showing that there has never been an assault in a bathroom because of them, we have even more! Media experts, law enforcement, and real live trans people explain why the fear of men “pretending” to be trans to attack women and children in bathrooms has no basis in reality, and More Republican Lawmakers Arrested For Sexual Misconduct In Bathrooms Than Trans People.

But it’s important to note that in the 200 cities and 17 states with laws like this [allowing trans people to use the bathroom that matches their identity] already on the books, there are no examples documented of someone using it for nefarious purposes, of a transgender person who is this sex predator in the bathroom. It’s got no factual foothold. If anything, the irony in this is that it actually would require — and North Carolina now requires transgender men who have beards, who are muscular, to use the women’s restroom. So it actually creates the very problem that it claims to solve. —Dominic Holden, speaking on PBS’s Newshour

Why have I chosen today, the Day of Pink, which is supposed to be a day to raise awareness of bullying to come back to this topic? Because any time a law criminalizes or otherwise penalizes people because of their real or perceived sexual orientation or gender, it encourages bullying. Businesses, school officials, hospital workers, and so on will reference the law as justification when they discriminate against someone who is queer or gender-non-conforming. The laws foster the notion that it is okay to mistreat, demean, and bully some people.

Ironically, these bathroom bills increase the likelihood that there will be assaults in bathrooms. It’s just that the victims will be the queer kids (or kids who are perceived by their peers as being queer). And it’s not as if school bathrooms aren’t already a place of terror for kids who are perceived as gender non-conforming, let along openly gay or trans children! In my early elementary school days, most of the teachers were women, and so the boys’ bathroom was a place where other boys could gang up on the class sissy or freak (usually me) with impunity. It got so bad for me at one school, that I simply stopped going to the bathroom at school. I avoided drinking anything all day, to try to stay out. My mom kept asking why I was running home from school and rushing straight to the bathroom.

So you can imagine the horror I felt when I read the headline: Kansas Bill Would Pay Students A $2,500 Bounty To Hunt For Trans People In Bathrooms! Geeze, talk about dehumanizing children!

"More United States Senators have been arrested for sexual misconduct in bathrooms than trans women."
It’s not just a meme…
I quote Dominic Holden (who used to write for one of our local weekly alternative papers, so I’ve been a fan for years) for his appearance on PBS’s Newshour above, and I’ve embedded a Youtube video of a snippet below (the link after the embed leads to a longer video and transcript, by the way). And while I agree with most of Dominic’s points, I think he gets one little bit slightly wrong. “…it’s really put LGBT advocates in a difficult place because they haven’t figured out how to respond to this. And for the most part, they have not taken it on directly.”

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

The part I disagree with is where he says that these laws have put advocates in a difficult place. No, we put ourselves there.

We were so giddy at the Supreme Court ruling, that we allowed ourselves to think the battle was won. I say “we” even though I was raising this concern back then. I raised the concern, but what did I do about it? Most of our official advocacy groups have been avoiding taking the issue on directly. They responding half-heartedly, if at all, to some of the earliest instances of backlash. They deployed a really generic fairness response in the Houston equal rights repeal, for instance.

And to imply that we don’t know how to respond is simply wrong. The current trans bathroom bill arguments are not substantially different than the arguments they have always made against queer people. The bigots have always claimed we are delusional—our orientation or gender identity is a choice we’ve made for sinful or other nefarious reasons, not an inherent characteristic. They have always claimed that we are dangerous sexual predators. They have always claimed that acknowledging our existence will cause confusion and harm to children. Exactly how they couched those arguments has changed. Which segment of the non-heterosexual population they were demonizing has changed, but the essence of the arguments are the same.

That is what they are claiming now. We’ve dealt with those arguments before. We have won battles in the court of public opinion against those arguments before. We can do it again. We just have to actually try. Marriage equality was only one touchdown out of a very long game. And it directly benefits only some of us, and only in some situations. The fight still belongs to all of us.

Confessions of a technology addict

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1386838922151614I was voting in the Locus Awards (annual sci fi/fantasy award poll held by Locus Magazine, which is open to anyone who wants to vote), and was completing the survey portion at the end, when I got to the question, “Do you own a computer? If so, how many?” and I paused for only a moment. See, I personally own three right now: my 7-year-old Mac Pro tower (gigantic thing that was way more powerful than I needed when I bought it because I wanted to be happy with it for years), my Macbook Pro laptop (also known as Hello, Sweetie!), and a 6-year old Windows 7 ultrabook (aka Macbook Air knock-off) for those few old programs I have that I can’t find equivalents of for Mac. Those are my personal computers.

Then there is my iPad Air 2, which I use for several laptop functions, particularly at work, because it is better at them than the clunky old Dell laptops that my employer provided (though we are finally, finally starting to get upgrades this year!). It is clearly a computing device, and a lot more powerful than many computers I’ve owned in the past. And I’m always pointing out that iPhones and high-end smartphones in general are actually pocket computers that obviate a phone, not merely phones themselves…

And then there’s another way to look at it. I’m married, and we’re living in a community property state, so technically my computers also belong to Michael, but more importantly for this survey, his belong to me and… well, I have no clue how many he owns. I mean, he has his older Macbook Air that he carries back and forth to work, and then there is his much nicer Macbook Pro that he uses for more serious portable computing, and then there are, if I just peek at his desk, four PC towers and mini-towers, and I see at least one laptop, and counting how many things are plugged into his giant KVM switch (that allows all of his desk computers to share his monitors, keyboard, and mouse)…. well, if I’m counting those right, there is at least one more computer in that desk somewhere that I can’t see. Plus the Mac Mini in another room that we use as a media server, and I know there are at least two laptops in his pile of “machines I could make usable if someone we know has a complete computer failure and needs something now” pile…

You can see why I have no clue how many computers he owns. So I asked him, “Honey, how many computers do you own?” To which he frowned, looked at me a little bit sheepishly, and said, “I have no idea. Why?”

I decided since he can vote in the Locus Awards himself, that I could just answer 3 for me, and not worry about the rest. Particularly since I could see that a subsequent question asked whether we owned any of the following: smartphone, tablet, iPod, e-book reading device. So I could count some of my other computing devices there.

Thank goodness they didn’t ask how many of those!

I only own the one iPad, myself. But since I have never gotten around to re-selling my old iPhone when I upgraded to the new one, I technically have more than one of those. And then there are iPods other than my phone: one for the car, one that I use as a watch, one that plugs onto my alarm clock and helps wake me up each morning, and I think four spares for the car (because we’ve had more than one stolen from the car over the years). The spares are squirreled away on my desk, so it would take me a bit to find them.

And my husband is worse, because he has more than one iPad he uses regularly (one lives more or less permanently in his bicycle bag. It’s an older one that he salvaged form a junk bin at work where it had a shattered screen and a slightly bent body; he straightened the body, installed a new screen, and may have done some other repairs to it to make it fully functional again).

So I should clarify, for people that don’t know, that one of the reasons we are over-supplied in this technology department is because he works for a computer recycler/refurbisher, and he frequently acquires dead or damaged computers, iPods, et cetera, and cobbles together working devices by scavenging parts out of them. And, truth be told, he did that sort of thing before he started working at this place, he just has a slightly more ready supply of the damaged tech to choose from.

But none of that explains my headphone collection. Because I have a bunch of those. Way more than I could reasonably use. I mean, I can only use one pair at a time, right? Well, it’s just easier to have one pair of wireless headphones that I wear for riding the bus to work, walking home, and so forth, and a wired pair kept with my desktop computer. And a wired pair with a good boom microphone for my laptop… and then there were those gorgeous purple headphones I originally bought for the laptop, but their microphone has degraded a bit, and they’re no longer really good for conference calls to work on my work-from-home days, or skype calls with friends; so I had to get the newer pair mentioned previously, but the sound quality for listening is still awesome, and they’re gorgeous purple, so I can’t throw them out!

And there’s a pair of wired headphones that live in my personal backpack so I have a set of noise cancelling headphones at conventions and such in case I need them. And a backup set of wireless headphones (or four or five, if I’m honest and look in that place on the desk where I keep them) for those moments (which happen with every pair of wireless headphones eventually), when you turn them on and prepare for your commute and you hear that dreaded crackle in one side… or no sound at all from one side. And there’s at least one backup set of headphones in my office bag, in case the wireless ones die while I’m out and about. And another set of wired noise-cancelling headphones that stay at the office so I can deploy them when co-workers (such as certain meetings that happen regularly in the conference room nearest my desk) get too loud and distracting for me to work. And, of course, a backup pair in my “computer things we regularly take to conventions” bag…

See, my headphone addiction is much, much worse than my iPod problem!

And then there are word processing programs! When I counted recently, I had nine or ten on my iPhone, a similar number on my iPad (but they aren’t all the same, because a couple of them are iPad-only, and some that are on the iPhone aren’t on the iPad for one reason or another), and there are way, way, way more on my laptop… Because some of them are better for some kinds of writing than others, and most of them can read each others’ files, anyway, so why not?

And let’s not talk about how many are installed on the desktop computer that aren’t on the laptop, nor why my Windows machine that I almost never use because it’s a backup, really, but it has more than one…

…and there is at least one licensed copy of a word processor that I prefer on my husband’s Macbook Air that I purchased and put on there so I could use his laptop if mine wasn’t available.

At least not all of my addictions are entirely digital. Most of the dictionaries I own are the old-fashioned printed on paper type…

…most…

Which part of ‘love thy neighbor’ confuses you?

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Billboard that went up in Jacksonville, Mississippi this week after the new anti-LGBT law was signed. “Guys, I said I hate figs and to love thy neighbor.”
Billboard that went up in Jacksonville, Mississippi this week after the new anti-LGBT law was signed. “Guys, I said I hate figs and to love thy neighbor.” (click to embiggen)
Lots of us have been predicting that there would be many, many more of these so-called “religious freedom” laws passed with an intent to discriminate against queer people, and that there would be more of the anti-trans bathroom bills passed in states since the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. Some people thought that the swift backlash from both regular citizens and the business community which prompted the repeal of the Illinois law and then a similar Arizona law’s governor’s veto last year would put a damper on the anti-gay legislation fervor. I was not one of the latter. I knew that the bigots would keep doing this for years to come. The war for equality isn’t over. We’ve made a few touchdowns, we’ve stymied a few of the other side’s scoring drives, but there is a lot of struggle still ahead.

Mississippi’s governor signed a bill this week that is pretty awful. It protects any individual, business, or organization (including hospitals) that want to refuse service to gay people due to a sincerely-held religious belief or moral conviction that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, that sexual relations should take place only inside such marriages, and that the terms male or female refer to individuals’ immutable biological sex. So it specifies which “religious beliefs” are protected. That is not religious freedom, that is religious imposition. That’s not protecting someone’s right to a belief, that is forcing a very specific set of so-called religious convictions upon everyone.

Yes, the law later has specific language that says that it shouldn’t be construed to imply that anyone can be refused emergency medical treatment, but it will be construed that way, and people will die. We’ve had situations like this before. A lesbian couple was vacationing in Florida some years ago, one member of the couple was in an accident, her partner had their medical power of attorney paperwork, but was refused admittance to the hospital room, was not allowed to give consent to her partner’s medical treatment, and the partner died while the hospital was trying to track down a blood relative. There was no legal basis for the hospital to refuse the power of attorney. Personnel at the hospital refused because they thought that Florida’s ban on same sex marriage invalidated the power of attorney (it did not). Florida courts subsequently ruled that the hospital had been wrong to do that under the law, however they also ruled that the hospital and employees weren’t liable for the death or any sanctions, fines, or lawsuit because they had thought they were acting in good faith.

And that is part of the reason that these “religious freedom” laws are so dangerous. People will decide that their bias is more important than the life of a “sinner”—and other people will be harmed and sometimes even die. Often the person who let them die will get off despite those caveats in the law because it will be decided that they were acting in good faith.

The idea that the law will protect you if you discriminate against certain types of people will encourage people to take it further. As Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his famous dissent of the Supreme Court case that upheld sodomy laws, the mere existence of such laws, even when it was shown that they were largely unenforced, creates the notion that certain types of people are less than human. The existence of even a narrowly-focused law used to justify a plethora of other types of discrimination against people who the law is aimed at. A few years later, when the Supreme Court reversed that ruling and invalidation all sodomy laws, Justice Kennedy quoted Stevens’ earlier dissent in explaining the reason the court had changed course.

The most galling part of all of this is that these people are claiming to be following Jesus when the propose withholding medical care from queer people,  refusing to sell food to queer people, refusing the rent to queer people, et cetera. No matter how many times I read the gospels—especially the Sermon on the Mount—I can’t find anything that Jesus said that could be construed to condone such action, let alone command it! In fact, Jesus said that if someone sues you for the shirt off your back, give them your shirt and your coat, also. He doesn’t say change the law so you can shun and be cruel to some of your neighbors and be immune to being sued or legally punished for any of the consequences thereof!

This is why people are fleeing the churches, particularly young people. These folks have redefined Christianity, replacing Jesus’s teachings with condemnation of gay people. You can ignore any and all of Jesus’s actual commandments, but if you’re anti-gay enough you’ll be the hero of the Christian Right.

When laws like this are enacted, they don’t just hurt the people who get the services denied. They scare other people. They send a message that people who don’t conform to one group’s religious precepts are less than human, that they are not safe, that they cannot count on the police to help them if crimes are committed against them, that they aren’t welcome, that they won’t be treated fairly before the law. And that’s why businesses speak out against these laws. It isn’t because they are beholden to some mythic ally power queer lobbying force. It’s because employees—not just queer employees—don’t feel safe being sent to those states to work.

The truth is, no one should feel safe in places that have laws like this. Because the law gives judgmental people a license to punish anyone they think might be queer, or might be supportive of queer people. That makes these laws a form of terrorism—they are intended to scare queer people back into the closet, and with that stuff about biological sex and sex outside of marriage, all sorts of other people to lie and hide and pretend to be something they aren’t—and I can’t find any definition of love that condones that.

And then I felt better about the world

life,
"To the person going through our trash for your next meal: You are a human being and worth more than a meal from a dumpster. Please come inside during operating hours for a classic Pb&j, fresh veggies, and a cup of water no charge. No questions asked. - Your friend, the owner."
“To the person going through our trash for your next meal: You are a human being and worth more than a meal from a dumpster. Please come inside during operating hours for a classic Pb&j, fresh veggies, and a cup of water no charge. No questions asked. – Your friend, the owner.” (click to embiggen)
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There are tumblr posts that come through my dashboard that make me proud to be a human. These images came from one.

"An elderly man in my neighborhood had a heart attack while shoveling his driveway. Paramedics took him to the hospital, then return to finish shoveling his driveway for him."
“An elderly man in my neighborhood had a heart attack while shoveling his driveway. Paramedics took him to the hospital, then return to finish shoveling his driveway for him.”
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Once again, I had another post I meant to finish, but passing on a bit of uplifting news seemed a better use of my time and bandwidth.

"As I stood in line at the REDACTED public library, I watched as a clerk told a little girl she couldn't check out a book because she owed a $0.29 fine—then I watched as a teenage boy behind her dig in his pocket for some change to pay it for her. And then I felt better about the world."
“As I stood in line at the REDACTED public library, I watched as a clerk told a little girl she couldn’t check out a book because she owed a $0.29 fine—then I watched as a teenage boy behind her dig in his pocket for some change to pay it for her. And then I felt better about the world.”
.

I hope where ever you are, that you have at least a few moments to lift your mood. We all need little reminders that good things happen in the world, too. And sometimes the smallest kindness makes the biggest improvement in another person’s day.

Life, Death, and Unanswerable Questions

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Logan L. Masterson, author of Ravencroft Springs.
Logan L. Masterson, author of Ravencroft Springs.
I had another post I was going to finish today, but then I got the news that Logan Masterson, an author I passed in the halls just a few days ago at NorWesCon, took his own life last night.

To be clear, I didn’t know Logan. I had seen him at least once before, and I had read a guest post or two of his on some of the myriad sf/f themed blogs and sites that I read, but I don’t believe I’ve ever even sat in a panel that he was participating in. Nor had I read any of his books, so it’s a little weird that hearing through my social media stream that he had died struck me the way it did.

Seriously, when I passed him in the hall this last weekend, it took me several seconds to remember why he seemed familiar. His name didn’t come to mind right way.

So why did the news upset me so? Maybe it’s the juxtaposition of how much fun I had at NorWesCon; and how—for me—a good convention experience leaves me feeling a renewed sense of purpose and a new appreciation for what a wonderful, messy, diverse, and strange variety of humans make up what I think of as “my peeps?” Maybe also a little bit of guilt that I could be having such a great time while another human I was (however briefly) sharing space with was apparently in great pain?

Someone who does know Logan personally has written about it: Silence or Violence: Logan, Suicide, and the Culture of Masculine Silence. And I think this part is spot on:

We need to be more compassionate, and more aware that we don’t know what’s going on in one another’s heads and hearts.

We seriously need to STOP MAKING A FUCKING SPORT out of shredding one another in public for fun.

We must stop holding each other to, and stop teaching our children to expect, impossible standards with unhealthy results.

And when someone cries out – regardless of their gender and our thoughts of how they “should” be acting in that time of crisis – we goddamned well should fucking LISTEN. And not make it about ourselves.

I know I’m guilty of failing to listen. All of that socialization about being strong and handling problems makes us say things we think are encouraging, but don’t sound that way to the person who needs a little compassion. If I read a post or an article by someone talking about feeling unattractive or undesirable, my first instinct is to argue with them. If I hear someone lamenting a bad situation, my first instinct is to tell them what I think they ought to be doing (or have already done) to fix the problem.

Instead, our first instinct should be to listen, to ask whether they want anything from us before we start outlining a plan to fix their lives, and offer hugs if we think they’re comfortable with it.

Hugs can’t fix everything. Listening can’t fix everything. But most of the time we don’t need to be fixed, we just need to know we’re not alone.