Apparently, people disappointed by the recent election results in the USA are so upset they are thinking of leaving the country. I know just how they feel. I was greatly dismayed when Bush won re-election and and also decided migration was a good course of action.
If you want to move, I strongly encourage you to go for it. Not because it effects me, I’m already abroad and you’ll vote from wherever you are, but because immigration is an excellent opportunity for personal growth. It’s also a logistical challenge but manageable. Don’t let property concerns stop you! I own a house full of furniture, but found very reliable tennants.
Where to move? I wanted someplace adequately foreign and distant but that wasn’t bewlidering. I was fairly monolingual. My first choices were EU countries where English is not the dominant first language. I won’t lie: the language gap of living in France was extremely challenging. I’ve ended up living in England and, although this is not because of language, it is really a luxury and a relief to be able to communicate in my native language.
Those of you who have political issues now will have additional concerns, of course. Basically, every developed and many developing coluntries have socialist prgrammes in place, such as healthcare. Still, one of the privileges of being an immigrant is that bizarre or poor chloices of your host country are not your problem. You’re just a guest. Don’t let naysayers stop you when they point out your choice country is lead by an atheist or has social programmes you disapprove of. There is no stable country that has a libertarian government which means that there is no utopia to go to. So what? We live in an imperfect world and you can at least get away from the meltdown of your own homeland.
My advice is to start thinking about how you might immigrate and where you might go. Do you have skills that are in demand? Does your employer have overseas operations? Is there an educational program you can enroll in? (Some countries do not charge fees for students and may even cover your living expenses, although this is pretty socialist and there are usually age restrictions.) Look out for fellowships for career development as many of these are industry funded. Some countries will allow Americans to set up businesses, so if you own a bakery here, you could instead have one there. Many countries have shortages of people in skilled trades, like plumbers and nurses. Some just have demographic worries and will take anybody willing to work. If you’re American, there is definitely a country that will take you!
Once you arrive, don’t ghetto-ize! It’s a good idea to make some American friends where you go, as they’ll celebrate Thanksgiving with you and can help show you the ropes, but make sure to have non-American friends as well. Expats who live entirely in American bubbles seem to get kind of bitter. And no wonder as they are perpetually in between places, niether in America or fully in their new country. Remember, whether your migration is temporary or permanent, you will live where you live. Try to have at least half your friends be non-American and at least a few native friends. There will be people around who want to practice their English or who have experience of living abroad and will have empathy for your moments of confusion. Join a local church. Meetups are also a good way to meet people.
It took me a couple of years to organise my move, so don’t worry if you can’t rush. Moving abroad isn’t easy, but it can be very rewarding. Your ancesgtors thought so! Give it a go.
Category: Uncategorised
Ten Years
I mentioned on twitter recently that my blog was ten years old last month. What I didn’t mention is that I started it because my mom had brain cancer and I was sending out mass emailing of status updates on this and my overwhelmed friends urged me to start a blog instead of fill up their inboxes.
This week is another ten year anniversary in that thursday marks ten years since my mom died. She was only sick for about four months. I knew her death was imminent, but was still shocked when it came. Well, not shocked. I’m not sure what I felt aside from overwhelmed.
The anniversary is making me feel kind of fragile this week and I know I’ve heard other people say the same thing happens to them with anniversaries. But, I mean, I don’t get it really. It’s been ten years and it’s hardly fresh or new and she’s not more dead this week than she was last week or will be next week. I guess it’s not important why this date matters, since it clearly does.
So I think I should mark it somehow but am not sure what to do. Saint Candles are the obvious choice, but they seem to be an American (read:the continent) thing. I don’t know if I could find any in the UK and I don’t want to ship them from North America if they will arrive next week or later and have to deal with all of this over again.
A few friends have suggested that I go into a church and light a votive candle there. They’re right in that my mom certainly would have appreciated the gesture and my presence in a Catholic church. I think this would just make me angry. Everyone called my mother’s mother a saint when she died. She was a larger than life figure in many ways and had admirable principles that she held to. I doubt she saw herself as a saint. My mom was in her mother’s shadow for a long time and only outlived her mother by about ten years. I don’t know if anyone called my mom a saint. And my mom certainly didn’t believe in her own saintedness. She was entirely convinced she was going to hell. During the brief period where she understood she was dying, she was terrified and upset that she would shortly be burning in hell. This is not a way to spend the last few weeks of your life.
The church’s actual teaching is that if you’re very sorry and repent, you don’t have to go to hell. She didn’t remember that part. She just remembered the part where she felt horrendously guilty for minor sins and would certainly be punished for eternity. The church did not give my mom peace in her last days. Nor in the days before that.
There was some volunteer who came around for a while to read the bible to her. I don’t know who organised this. My mom had trouble speaking because of the cancer but one day managed a ‘shut the hell up’ and got the volunteer to actually talk to her like a human. That made her feel better.
So I don’t want to go into a church, since that will just make me angry. Making people terrified of hell is abusive. That they have an escape cause doesn’t help. If it did, it would have helped my mom. All she remembered was the part they went on and on about which was eternal torment.
In any case, I’m not wholly sure that offering eternal bliss is better. Maybe it makes the dying person feel better. I don’t know, as it’s all so conditional. Why would you offer conditional love to a dying person? What does it cost to assert that they’re actually loved?
Priests tell mourners at funerals that it’s all temporary and soon we’ll all being hanging out together again, so I guess the best they have to offer is denial. I know exactly where my mom is right now and where she’s been the last ten years. It’s a small plot marked with an ugly headstone.
Which I can’t get to because I am thousands of miles away and the UK Border agency still has my passport.
So I’ll burn a non-saint candle and wonder why I’m doing mini-grieving this week, feeling sad and angry over again, wondering why round numbers matter. If we used hexadecimal as our standard counting system, it would be another six years. It’s all so arbitrary. Every part of it – who gets cancer, who dies, what dates seem important and on what years. And maybe the arbitrariness: from top to bottom, from every angle is what makes it all seem so futile and extra sad. An arbitrary milestone. An arbitrary existence. An arbitrary end.
How I got Second Life on Linux
When I tried to run Second Life’s beta release on linux, from the command line, I got the following error:
64-bit Linux detected. Running from /home/celesteh/.secondlife-install - Installing menu entries in /home/celesteh/.local/share/applications bin/do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libGL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory *** Bad shutdown ($LL_RUN_ERR). *** You are running the Second Life Viewer on a x86_64 platform. The most common problems when launching the Viewer (particularly 'bin/do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin: not found' and 'error while loading shared libraries') may be solved by installing your Linux distribution's 32-bit compatibility packages. For example, on Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linuxes you might run: $ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk ia32-libs-kde ia32-libs-sdl ******************************************************* This is a BETA release of the Second Life linux client. Thank you for testing! Please see README-linux.txt before reporting problems.
I checked if I had libGL.so.1 installed. I did:
$ sudo find / -name libGL.so.1 [sudo] password for celesteh: /usr/lib32/mesa/libGL.so.1 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1
I went to the directory where Second Life installs itself (the install.sh script tells you where this is when you run it. And I edited the script called SecondLife. I changed this line:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$PWD/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}"
To this:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$PWD/lib:/usr/lib32/mesa:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}"
Note that /usr/lib32/mesa is one of the results I got from running find. It’s the one that seems to be 32 bit.
After I fixed that, it opened (and popped a warning saying my computer is underpowered, which I assume is another library issue. I have NO IDEA what to do about this. Will update if and when I figure it out.
I know what you’re thinking. and the answer is that the network is the computer. And the live coding is the music. and SecondLiveCoding is the future.
Some Folks Have Forgotten About Bush
Not, not just the RNC, who spent their entire convention pretending he never existed, but also the manarchist left. Both parties are fascists, they say.
I’ll just note that everybody I’ve heard say this is a straight, white, cis man. Rmoney is currently polling at 0% with black people. Probably because he’s running the most racist campaign I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. But I guess if racism doesn’t matter to you, the parties are equal. And if you’re cis and didn’t have to worry about doctors refusing to treat you on account of being trans, a situation that has changed over this summer, I guess the parties are equal. And … you know what. I’m going to cut this section short. Anybody who has been paying even the tiniest bit of attention to social issues knows there is a massive gulf between the parties and the only way one could claim equivalence is to completely brush aside the concerns of women, of LGBT people, of people of colour and of several other groups.
But on some level, the manarchists are right. The parties only disagree on some issues and march in lock step with whatever their corporate masters agree on. There is a lot of stuff that is not up for debate that the parties absolutely agree on. They’ve got us over a barrel. If we split the vote on the left or if we just stay home, then Rmoney wins and that does have a very real effect on the lives of many vulnerable groups.
Political leaders don’t lead. They follow. They follow money and they follow social movements. It takes years to build a movement. Occupy is fantastic, but it’s new and hasn’t yet had a chance to make a major change in things. If there’s nothing been building on the left for a while, then there’s nothing for the politicians to follow.
Nobody has EVER voted in positive political change. Political parties are not movements. You’re not going to get a socialist utopia through the ballot box. Ever. Positive political change has always come from the streets and it always will come from the streets. If you’re disappointed by your major party options on the left, then go spend some time hanging out with Occupy. Join a union. Join a march. Show up for things. Make noise. Get active.
If voting didn’t matter, there wouldn’t be a massive coordinated plan to disenfranchise people across the US. The people being disenfranchised are poor, are black, are transgender, are students, and are old. This matters..
In 2000, I remember people saying that Bush and Gore were both in the hands of corporations, that it didn’t matter who won. It really fucking mattered. Rmoney is not better than Bush. Four more years of stupid will destroy America.
There will be nothing left of out economy or our social safety net or of anything that made us great.
No, you don’t have to vote and nobody who wants a socialist welfare state or who wants peace is going to get elected to the presidency. Voting, like paying taxes and jury duty, is an unpleasant civic duty. You do it because it’s how society functions and because you love your country and because you care about your fellow citizens and because of your own self interest in hoping the dollar doesn’t crash. If you can’t do it for you, do it for me. I’ve only had the right to purchase healthcare in America for the last month or so. I’d kind of like to hold on to that right.
Twitter arguments – Updated
The other day, I got flamed on Twitter. I’ve reproduced the exchange here for your reading pleasure:
celesteh: So, um, Clint Eastwood yelled at a chair? Makes as much sense as anything else the GOP does, I guess.
shellymic: @celesteh It’s understandable that all of the concepts would be over your head. Better luck next time.
celesteh: @shellymic Oh, was it conceptual art? I should have read the programme notes!
shellymic: @celesteh That doesn’t even make sense…please stop trying, though. It’s ok.
celesteh: @shellymic Ah, I’ll slow down. See, there is more to art than paintings by Thomas Kinkaide. Sometimes people like to do surrealist theatre.
celesteh: @shellymic Ah nevermind. Even with the free time of recovering from surgery, pointless argument w strangers are too boring. You have fun tho
_markjrussel: @shellymic @celesteh no sense arguing with a liberal. They are not smart enough to understand much.
celesteh: @_markjrussell @shellymic I shall alert my university that my recent degree was granted in error.
celesteh: @_markjrussell @shellymic But seriously, why seek out and insult strangers on the internet? Doesn’t it get rather dull?
celesteh: @_markjrussell @shellymic Actually, I poked through your twitter feeds (too much free time, recovering from surgery) and discovered that …
celesteh: @_markjrussell @shellymic neither of you makes a habit of insulting strangers. I’m kind of curious what’s caused you to do so with me?
Sadly, I have received no reply thus far. _markjrussel has since locked his twitter feed.
My question was in earnest, though. When I got the first flame message, I thought that she must have just searched twitter for ‘GOP’ or ‘Eastwood’ and flamed indiscriminately. I thought this must be a politics of bullying. If you can find people who are personal tweeters who are not generally political and pile a few flames on them, you might be able to successfully intimidate them into silence and thus further an illusion of greater consensus towards your own point of view, as other views will have been aired publicly less often.
But then I went to verify that hypothesis and found that shellymic had, indeed, searched for tweets about Eastwood. But she had mostly retweeted them. The tweets she selected were terribly regrettable. (I would like to think that being on the left means avoiding hateful stereotypes and ageism or making shaming statements about disabled people, but, alas, in America every political stripe can come together to hate dis-empowered groups.) This is a technique I have often used as a way of illustrating poor political discourse and is fine in and of itself. The only other person she flamed, she first quoted.
Similarly, _markjrussel, while more punchy and loquacious, does not seem to make flaming even a significant minority of his twitter activity, although, obviously, I can’t reconfirm this now that he has locked his account.
So really, what gives? Obviously, I want to think it’s my stunning good looks and my brilliant wit that have drawn flames to me like literal flames normally draw moths, but I have a feeling that’s not it. So I’m putting out some questions for anyone reading this: Have you ever insulted a stranger on Twitter? What motivated you to do it? Is it something you do often? How do you decide who to insult?
I have a emotional sort of gut feeling that it’s somewhat appropriate to flame in comment threads or places where discussion is encouraged, but to me, it seems somewhat rude to attack private figures on Twitter. Do you agree or disagree? How do you decide when flaming is appropriate?
I doubt very much that shellymic or _markjrussel will ever vote the same way as me on anything, but I do think it could be helpful in general in America if people of different stripes understood each other better. I don’t like to think of my politics as a side in a match, scoring goals against each other. I want a better world where people are free to live and love and pursue their dreams without having to cope with a pervasive fear of falling.
Update
Well, I think I’ve gotten the only reply I’m going to get:
shellymic: @celesteh @_markjrussell Les, u r an annoying little twit. I didn’t read your little blog. I’ll just block u. Have a great life.
Update 2
shellymic has also locked her twitter feed.
Kronos Quartet at the Proms
I’ll start with the lows
I’ve been really grumpy about music lately and the at the start of this concert, my heart sank and I thought my grumpiness would continue. My friends and I got the promenade tickets for the arena area of the Royal Albert Hall (which is laid out somewhat like the Globe theatre, such that people stand around the stage). I had reasoned that string quartets were intimate, so it was better to be close. In fact, the acoustic of the hall are such that even standing not that far from the stage, the only sound I could hear was from the speakers. I might as well have been up way above, at least then freed of the burdensome expectations of non-amplified sounds.
The sound seemed slightly off the whole evening. At first, I thought the group lacked intensity, but they certainly looked intense. Somehow, it just wasn’t getting off the stage, lost somewhere in the compression of the audio signal. Lost in the tape backing they had for nearly every piece? Which (can we talk about this?) seemed to be really naff most of the time. There also seemed to be subtle timing issues throughout a lot of the concert and sometimes it just sort of felt like the seams were showing.
Kronos was my favourite string quartet for a long time, largely due to their distinctive bowing, but also due to their willingness to take risks, defy genre, etc. Unfortunately, this has becoming more and more gimicky as of late. One of their pieces, a BBC commission (so it’s not entirely their fault), had a Simon toy in it. The cellist would do a round of it and then play back the pitches in time, along with the other string players who also copied it. Along with tape backing, of course. Some of which seemed to be samples of Radiophonic sounds. I thought I recognised a single bass twang of the Doctor Who theme and I hoped they would just play that rather then the piece they were actually slogging through.
The best bit
However, they also played Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No 4: Amazing Grace, which was the piece I was most looking forward to. I didn’t know the piece, but I know the composer. The piece’s setting is lush Americana – Copland-esque but in a twenty first century context. The piece has a lot of busy-ness in it. It’s Americana glimpsed through the windows of speeding trains and moving cars. America between facebook posts. Constant distraction, the theme fragmented and subsumed in the texture of life. At one point, the violins and viola are busily creating their densely fragmented texture, while barely audibly, the cellist was playing the noted from Amazing Grace on the overtones of the highest parts of his strings. The notes of the melody become metaphor for Grace itself. Something transcendental and beautiful is always going on, giving meaning to a jumbled whole, sometimes so subtly that it’s difficult to perceive. The occasional moments of thematic clarity thus reminded me of tragedy, as that’s when grace becomes most apparent and evident.
It was really really beautiful and I teared up a bit.
The Good
Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No 4 was well-played and my friend Irene especially considered it to be a highlight. It’s a very good piece, but I’m sure I’ve heard the work before and I think it came off a bit better on those previous performances.
I thought the Swedish folk song Tusen tankar was also a high point. The piece was short, unpretentious and well played.
In general, they seemed to warm up and get going over the course of the concert and if they had ended with the last piece on the program, I would have gone home and felt pretty happy about them, but then they played an encore.
The tape part
I like tape (by which I mean any fixed media, like CDs or whatever). I write tape music. I like it when ensembles play along with tape. Tape is great.
Tape music is also sound that doesn’t immediately come from an instrument. So if it’s playing really processed or artificial sounds, that’s perfect, because those sounds couldn’t easily come from an instrument. But when it’s just filling in for a backing band that nobody wanted to pay to hire…. it’s naff. It’s inexcusably naff.
If Kronos wanted to play an encore with a metal band or whatever, I would have thought it surprising and maybe slightly gimicky. But they played an encore with a tape of a rock band. A tape that at one point got really loud with synchronised lights, while the quartet kept sawing away an unchanging string accompaniment. At that point, they played backup to a tape and tried to make it seem ok with lighting tricks. A tape of a rock band, not any kind of acousmatic tape. A let’s-just-play-a-tape-it’s-cheaper.
The high point of the concert was fantastic, but the low point . . .. I give them a mixed review overall.
Composer Control
I am writing this on my phone, so please pardon any typos.
I’ve just gone to see a piece of music, which I won’t mention the name of here. It was an interesting idea and technically competent and well-rehearsed, but it fell a bit flat in performance. The best moment of it was a long pause in the middle. The conductor and performers froze and the audience held its breath, waiting. What would happen next? Was the piece over? Was it still going? I had a composer once tell me that pauses add drama and this was the first time I would agree with that pronouncement.
I had a look at the score afterwards and it had a bar of rest with a fermata over it (that means ‘hold this’) and a asterisk to a footnote that said to hold it much longer than seemed reasonable or necessary. Interestingly, and i would say not coincidentally, this did seem to be the only thing not precisely notated in the work. Everything else about the sound production had been pre-decided by the composer and the ensemble was carrying out his eaxcting instructions.
This does seem to be the dominant theme of 21st century music composition. Composers seem to want complete control over musical output. Some, like Ferneyhough with his total complexity, approach this at an ironic distance. They intentionally overnotate in a way they know is unplayabe, to produce a specific kind of stress in the performer. But more recently, the trend is to overnotate but remain playable with the sincere intention of getting exact performances every time. Or, at least, to control what elements are exactly repeatable and treat the freer parts as one might treat a random generator or a markov chain in a computer program.
I played very briefly in the Royal Improvising Orchestra in the Hague and I have very positive things to say about that experience and the other members of the group. However, the control thing was still evident and creeping in. They had borrowed from another a group a very large set of hand signs, designed so the conductor could tell the supposedly improvising players what to play. Indeed, with those hand signals in use, it was no longer accurate to say that the players were improvising. Instead, the conductor was and were mechanisms for carrying out his musical will. Fortunately, that was only a small aspect of our performance practice. When we were doing this, we all took turns conducting, so we got a tradeoff and still were improvisers, at least some of the time.
I mentioned above being treated as an aspect of a computer program and, indeed, I think that is the source of the current state of affairs. Many younger composers (I’m including myself in this group, so read “younger” as “under 50”) have become reliant on score notation programs and write music without being able to read it very well. With MIDI playback, it is possible to know what notes will sound like together even if you can’t read the chord or find the keys on the piano.
The major drawback on relying on MIDI renditions of our pieces is that they sound like MIDI – they are precise, robotic and unchanging. Pieces that are written to sound good for that kind of playback often don’t work very well with live ensembles. One solution to this dilemma seems to be to treat ensembles more like MIDI playback engines, rather than adapt our style of writing for real conditions. This is a failure of imagination.
Those who are pushing notation and musical ideas in new directions are not so naive as the above paragraph suggests, but we still have become accustomed to being able to control things very precisely. When I write a musical structure into a program, I know it will be followed exactly. when I want randomness, I have to specify it and parametrise it precisely as well. In the world of computer composition, adding randomness and flexibility is extra work.
For humans, it’s the exactness that’s extra work and one that has faint rewards for audiences and for performers. It sucks the life out of pieces. It makes performing dull and overly controlled. It is an unconscious adoption of totalitarian work practices, informed and normalised by the methods of working required for human computer interaction. The fact that most professional ensembles barely schedule any rehearsal time does not help with this phenomenon, as they do not tend to spend the time required to successfully interpret a piece, so we seek to spell it out for them exactly.
Composers would do well to step back and imagine liberating their performers, rather than constraining them. We would also do well by learning to read scores. Computers are fine tolls for writing, but could you imagine a playwright using text-to-speech tools in order to create a play? Imagine what that would do to theatre! I think that’s happening now to music.
But, as in today’s performance, the most magical moments in performance are the ones where performers are empowered. If you don’t think you can trust them, then you’ve picked the wrong performers or written the wrong piece. In the best musical performances, the emotional state of the performer is followed by the emotional state of the audience. Give them something worth following.
The Last Days of Dog
When Xena was first diagnosed, I started trying to think of nice things to do with her. We did some of them. I stuffed her into my bike trailer and took her through the canals into Vicky Park. The thing is that she was still seriously unwell, even if she was functional with pain killers. Her favourite activities almost all involved physical activity, which she had trouble with.
We went on some nice walks, but not long ones. Her favourite low impact activity was always going to parties, so we went to parties. Sonia’s going away party was large and crowded, with densely packed people, all merrily drinking. Xena weaved among them, charming people and nicking unguarded food. She was a social butterfly. As it got very late, I got worried about her getting tired or trampled, so I took her upstairs to chill out. I was exhausted and wanted to go to sleep, in fact. A lost party guest opened the room door and she darted out and rejoined the stragglers, happy to be in the midst of things.
That was probably her happiest night after being diagnosed and I’m glad she got it.
I found a new flat in time for my eviction. Sonia left the country for the year. Xena slowly, but surely kept declining, with brief rallies. Meanwhile, all the pills she was taking meant she needed frequent walks, during the day. And during the middle of the night. She often seemed at her perkiest, happiest and most mobile at 3 AM.
When I finally moved to a ground floor flat, it seemed to greatly increase her mobility. This week, on Tuesday morning, I took her to the park and she actually ran a bit. Wendyl, my new housemate, took her out for a walk, and Xena excitedly tugged on her lead the whole way.
Wednesday, maybe from overdoing it, maybe from just reaching a threshold, she was much more stiff and limped to the park. On previous days, she would often limber up as she walked, even if she got off to a rough start, but that day her limp just got worse and worse. I gave her pain killers and they didn’t help. I accidentally left treats within reach and she left them alone, preferring to lie on the floor. So I called the vet to make an appointment.
Then I fed her every treat in the house whilst waiting for the cab. I knew this would eventually upset her stomach, but I thought she would not actually experience the ill effects of this. But then the vet was running behind and we waited over an hour. She looked miserable from being in the vets’ office, from the pain in her leg, and presumably from an upset stomach.
Because the euphemism is “putting her to sleep,” I assumed it would resemble sleep in some way, but it did not. She did not tire and relax as much as she crumpled.
Vets say these drugs are humane and painless and kind. Anti-death penalty activists say they’re painful and cruel. Somebody here is wrong.
I wish they had sedated her first.
I’ve never seen anyone die before. The dog I had as a kid apparently got into rat poison and died 10 minutes before I arrived to see him. I was not at the bedside of either of my grandmothers or my cousins. My uncle died in his sleep without warning. When my mum died, I was at opera, seeing Messiaen’s St Francis of Assisi, feeling unhappy about how the hugging of the leper was treated. My experience of death is funerals and loss and digging my first dog’s grave and fetching my neighbour’s drowned cat from the pond. Xena won’t have grave, won’t have a funeral. The only thing left is to give away all her things.
The vet said I did the right thing. I tried to explain I hadn’t just let it go until she was staggering. That she got suddenly worse. That I hadn’t carried her because I knew that also hurt her shoulder.
Today, I woke up extremely early and got on a train to Birmingham to sound check for a gig I played in this evening. Because my life goes on, at least, even if hers doesn’t.
And when we finished earlier than I expected, I got a train tonight back to London instead of waiting for the morning, as that’s easier, so I was feeling kind of good about it and thought I should send a text to … nobody. There’s nobody waiting for me. There’s nobody who cares if I go back today or tomorrow. I have no particular responsibilities. No job. I am uneeded. I can sleep through the night without having to wake up for a walk. If I reach to my side while I sleep, my bed will be empty and my floor bare. I can go wherever I want and do whatever I want. And if what I want is a walk to the park, I’ll go alone.
I killed my dog today
A while ago, I posted that Xena had cancer. The vet sent me home with steroids and tramadol, a pain killer. Gradually, she needed more and more pain killer until today, when something got much worse overnight and she could barely walk at all.
I called the vet to ask how much it would cost to get a housecall and then I started calling for cabs that would take a dog. I wish I could say something nice or reassuring about her death. I showed up at the vet’s office and they were running more than an hour behind, so Xena lay in the middle of the waiting room floor and looked around nervously. Then she limped around with me to a back room, where she was frightened and hurting. She lay down on a blanket they put out. The vet shaved a section of her leg to give her a shot. She sniffed my eyes where I was crying as he pushed in the injection and just collapsed her head down and had stopped breathing within a moment.
He said she felt no pain, but how would he know that?
I took her collar off and her head flopped easily in my hands. Her body was still warm, her ears still soft, her eyes still open.
I wish I had done it before she got that bad. I wish I hadn’t had to do it at all. It doesn’t matter what I wish.
Apples vs Oranges
In general, I try to avoid intra-feminst disputes because, although I still consider myself a feminist, it doesn’t really directly effect me and generally it’s not good when allies wade into stuff like that. I also doubly avoid annoying fights. (Frankly, being able to ignore stupid pseudo-feminist bullshit is an example of male privilege, but anyway.)
There is a constant, long-running fight between some bigoted radical feminists (called TERFs for some reason) and trans women. Obviously bigots are in the wrong, but arguing with them is like arguing with my kitchen table, so I mostly ignore this except when it becomes relevant. (It used to be that TERFs wanted to save me from being trans . . in the same way the Fred Phelps wants to save people from being gay.) It’s really much more fun to ignore them. However, they’re planning a conference in London that actively excludes trans women and this is discrimination. I don’t want to see this kind of event pass without comment, lest anyone get the idea that this kind of discrimination is ok. I doubt very many trans women would want to spend a weekend hanging around TERFs, but they should still face criticism for their bigotry.
Meanwhile, one of them wrote a blog post defending their London event as being better than a trans health conference being held in the US. Astute readers will note that a health conference in the US and a political conference in the UK are really not the same thing, but let’s pretend this argument is worth examining (as my other planned activity for this evening is putting everything I own into boxes).
BugBrennan specifically attacks the sponsors of the health conference for including pharmaceutical companies, government and religious organizations. I will admit that I also find the participation by pharmaceutical corporations to be problematic, but this is a consequence of the how the US chooses (not) to organise it’s health care system. The participation of for-profit entities in anything health-related is morally suspect, but, alas, that is the entire basis of the US health system. And, indeed, it makes sense to have health providers involved in a health conference. If there were a trans health conference in the UK, I would expect to see NHS sponsorship and involvement. If it were a large, mainstream conference like the one up for discussion, I would be concerned if the NHS were not involved. Trans people who take hormones do rely on pharmaceutical products and it’s better that our health needs are taken into account by the manufacturers of these products.
If this were a political conference, the participation by companies such as Johnson and Johnson would be much more suspect. But it is not.
And, in the same way, government involvement seems appropriate as trans health is a public health issue. Because of systemic transphobia, many trans people in the US are reliant upon government services to provide health care as they are unable to afford private care. A social worker in the city of San Francisco once told me that it is a cost-saving measure for them to provide free transition-related health care to poor trans people. I would expect this to be true in other places as well.
So what about religious groups? I speculate that they wanted to participate because they wanted to show that they are open communities and because they perceive trans people to be a vulnerable community. If there were a gay men’s health conference, I would also expect to see health, government and religious groups involved. Lest that be construed as supporting the patriarchy, if there were a lesbian health conference, I would also expect to see those same groups involved. Also, being trans is not a spiritual identity, any more than being cis is a spiritual identity. Some cis women are religious. Some are atheists. Some trans women are religious. Some are atheists.
Of course, a political conference probably wouldn’t have church support or government support or big pharma support, but if you look at the very long list of supporting organisations, some of them are the kind of thing you might expect at both a health conference and a political conference. Let’s look at some of them:
- Trans Masculine Advocacy Network (TMAN) which continues to provide leadership towards making PTHC better able to serve communities of color.
- The William Way Community Center which will be hosting this year’s opening reception
- The Attic Youth Center which will be helping to host this year’s Teen Space
GenderReel which will be hosting a mini-film fest on Thursday evening at the conference - Philadelphia Family Pride
- GenderQueer Revolution (GQR)
- Female to Male International (FTMi)
- Transgender People of Color Coalition (TPOCC)
There we have families, teens, community centres and non-white people! Now, I don’t know who or if anybody is sponsoring the radfem debacle coming soon to London and maybe they don’t have affinity groups for, say, people of colour. Maybe they think they don’t need them for some reason. Maybe they have a very good reason to sneer at gatherings that try to be visibly and openly inclusive to a racially and age diverse group of participants. I don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions.
Really, the TERF conference is going to be much much smaller, so it probably needs a lot less support and it’s not really fair to compare things that are so unlike. But given that their intended venue threw them out for being bigots and they are keeping the new location secret, I think it was strategically wise of them not to try to get community support.
Now does this one health conference mean, as BugBrennan suggests, that trans people are now fully integrated into power structures in America? Well, one can only hope that this is a step towards the end of systematic discrimination, but I’m afraid post-conference statistics on trans unemployment, hate crimes, etc are not yet available, so we’ll have to wait and see. Unfortunately, I suspect we still have a while to go.
Some of you may be wondering how it is feminist to discriminate against some women based on sex/gender? I will admit I don’t get it, but if any of you understand it, feel free to explain in the comments.