Now I Know His Name

For a long time, I didn't know his name, although I saw him almost every day. And then I fretted about not knowing his name.

But now I know his name. It's Jesse. He smiles and waves, "Hi, Mossie!" as I drive by, whether or not I have a dollar or a banana to give him.

The last few times I've had the first-in-line position, where I can roll down my window and talk with him until the traffic light changes, I've been especially sad. Today I was fighting back tears. But I still smiled at him.

He said, "You have such a pretty smile. It really brightens my day. It's great that you are so happy!"

"I'm actually really sad right now, Jesse. But I find that when I smile, it helps."

He smiles at me softly. "It helps me, Mossie. Thank you for your smile."

And so with tears splattering my lenses, I turned the corner and drove down Glisan Street to my office.

Smiling helps. Knowing his name helps, too.

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Further Perspective

After the 4/11 car incident, I intended to refrain from posting until the story had played itself out fully. [I made an exception for the plea for NineMile Canyon.]

I also thought I'd gain some insight on how to talk about news I received earlier in the afternoon on the day of the accident. I haven't figured out that tellling, but the accident story I can now address. The accident played out in the following ways:

1. Statements were given and reports were filed. Photos were taken. Measurements were provided. The story was recounted. Hours and hours were spent on the phone, in tears, telling it over and over. Sleep was lost. Nightmares were had. Eventually, Oregon Revised Statutes were named. Blame was placed. On me. My insurance company made tsking noises and raised my rates. Attorneys were consulted and said they were sorry, they couldn't help me. So much for my naive self-righteousness. So much for recouping money for damages to my car or time lost from work, let alone the nebulous pain and suffering.

2. The upside: I am now receiving much-needed chiropractic care. Oregon law requires that minimum liability insurance provide $15,000 in medical care, regardless of fault, and my body is starting to heal. For that blessing, I am breathing a huge sigh of relief.

3. Housemate N pshawed my lamentations about salvaging my beloved car (named Goldilocks) for a paltry $400. I'd talked to three different body shops, receiving repair quotes between $2500 and $7000. (In tip-top shape, Goldilock's bluebook value is $2200, though her value is so much more than that for oh-so-many reasons.) N was my rockstar savior, my guy, who drove me to the junkyard. On the drive there, I bounced up and down and said, "N, I feel more hopeful than I've felt in two weeks."

We hammered on Goldy's frame a bit.



And then we attached a door retrieved from a Silverlocks which had been in a head-on collision. N later put the window in the silver door, replacing the classy blue tarp that kept the rain out.



Sure, it's kind of ghetto-style, and opening and closing the car door presents its own set of adventures, but I will say this: at least the door isn't red.

4. This whole series of events provided significant distraction, and the further further perspective is just starting to sink in and sort itself out now. For weeks I've tried to encapsulate what happened earlier that afternoon, before the car door was ripped out of my hand, what's happened over the course of the last year, two years, five years - and every choice, every decision, every motivation become so convoluted and twisty that communicating meaning seems impossible.

So rather than force it, I'm going to let the story trickle out as it does. Drip drop. A deluge may ensue, but it could be a slow telling. The unfolding, the mystery. Are you curious? Excited? Confused? Disinterested?

Yeah, me too.

Random Peeps

One of my favorite things about blogging is to watch what search engine queries lead the poor unsuspecting searcher to my ever-random and undeniably self-indulgent webspot. Ah, sitemeter, thank you for feeding my voyeurism.

Dirty Eggs gets the most hits because somebody tagged it "cock" on a del.icio.us page, and apparently google sends people there for "how roosters fertilize eggs" and "chickens don't have penis" and "chicken eggs vagina or ass." Internet rovers are so curious! Just a few months ago, I ran the same searches trying to find out how to spell cloacae. The cycle of internet life continues.

S*x Reading and Mainstream S*x Stories also get hit, usually from ISPs in India and Indonesia and Ithaca, probably because people living in places with names beginning in the letter I are more prone to search for sex stories on the internet than people from Latvia or Liberia or Lafayette. Or so goes my theory of the moment.

Those who accidentally stumble across me don't usually stay long. Their desires for hot erotica unsatisfied, clickity-click, and off they go. I'm not sure what the chicken-seekers think.
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Clogged Up With a Lot to Say

Posts have been percolating, but I find myself unable to get there. I get stuck because my filter is mucked up with too much too much too much. Those posts might have to wait until after those magic days in 2.5 weeks when I take the bar exam. But they are coming.

I'll be back at the end of the month.

* This post was edited to remove gratuitous and unnecessary references originally included for my own amusement and probably not amusing to anyone else. *

Cassie's Birthday

Dipstick's posting about her snow dogs is prompting this post in honor of Cassie. It's timely, given that LittleGrrl turned six two days ago.

Cassie was born February 1, one week before the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, and is my very first dog. Given the totality of the circumstances, leaving her with B and K was assuredly the right choice. The prospect of taking her away from her home and her best friend was unacceptable to me. Nevertheless, moving 766 miles away from my canine companion was one of the hardest choices I've ever made. The privilege of caring for animals is a blessed responsibility, and making that particular decision about Cassie's future was perhaps the most unselfish thing I've ever done. Maybe there's hope for me yet!

Though it brings a lump to my throat, my heart swells when K sends pictures to my phone, like the one above from a hike in Memory Grove. I miss her fiercely, but it brings great comfort to know she is happy and cherished. Many thanks to B and K for continuing to give all the Avalon Animals such a good home. (They are now giving daily insulin shots to Buddy, whose obesity resulted in an unsurprising feline diabetes diagnosis a few months ago.)

So happy birthday to Cass; may your next six years be as joyful and full of adventure as the first six!

consume this

Victor Lebow, a post WWII retailing analyst:

"Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption . . . we need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.

This article, and the above quote, have prompted me to find creative ways around outright replacing my dear technological companion, though the prospect of being away from her again for repairs tears at my heart. (Why do they make these things disposable?! They told me I was LUCKY to get three years out of my laptop!)

So again I tell myself: Buy less. Live more.

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Men's Abortions & The War Mentality

Two weeks ago I read two articles about abortion on the same day. I'm glad I read them in the order that I did because the first one placed my paradigm in a more inclusive rather than exclusive stance.

The first article (A Change of Heart: From Pro Life to Pro Choice, AlterNet 1/9/08) included a perspective I needed to hear: "Our beliefs are not created by what -- or who -- we are against. They exist because of what we are for: comprehensive reproductive health for all, and the ability to decide for ourselves if we will or will not have an abortion."

A line from the second article (Changing Abortion's Pronoun, LA Times 1/7/08) elicited an audible groan from me, and my mind went to The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and Starhawk's description of The Southlands in The Fifth Sacred Thing. A man, discussing his personal regret about several ex-girlfriends' abortions: "'I never really thought about it for the woman,' he says slowly." What?! He never really thought about the woman part of the equation in an abortion scenario? Excuse me?

It's an interesting catch-22. Though it disgusts me, it doesn't surprise me that anti-abortion activists will utilize women's termination regret to influence the courts toward the incorrectly-perceived need to "protect" women from their own choices. But would they do the same with men's regret as a motivator? To protect men from themselves? I do not doubt that some men experience loss or sadness over the termination of a pregnancy in which they played a role. But is regret the best measure of whether or not government should permit certain reproductive medical decisions?

Back when I was a married-to-a-man queer grrl, before the polyamorous part of our marriage was predominant, my husband and I terminated a pregnancy. In Utah. I wrote about it here, when the South Dakota mess was in the news. In the post, I half-heartedly pretended it wasn't me, but it was probably pretty obvious. Many women have termination stories; I have one. I don't see why men shouldn't get to tell their stories too.

My ambivalence toward abortion topics is deep and multi-layered. I believe it important to let stories and voices be heard, and yet I also recognize the deeply personal realm of reproduction, coming from a family where fertility, miscarriage, and ectopic (tubal) pregnancies were wrapped in whispered conversations, kept from children, spoken about with solemn secrecy.

The more we share, all of us, the more information we have, the greater likelihood that we might just be able to see each other and really connect and not live under the illusion that our way of experiencing the world is the only way it's experienced. The more information, more connection, more understanding, more empathy, the better. That includes having empathy for people who truly believe that abortion should be illegal. If I can empathize with their feelings, it may be a vital step in bridging the gap in our perspectives, and maybe that person will one day believe that even if abortion is not a choice s/he would make or want a loved one to make, it is a choice that should nevertheless be available in a legal and safe way. The "fight" is more about increased connection and communication rather than fighting. Give peace a chance, wo/man.

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Blessed Intention

Upon reviewing yesterday's post I feel that much of it sounded like "wow, I'm so great," and that's not what I meant. Or at least not what I wanted to convey. I really wanted to express that seeing this guy, connecting with him the various ways I've connected, that's a blessing. Especially. Predominantly. Blessings can and are found in all sorts of circumstances. He is my blessing on the way to work everyday.

And the fact that I don't know his name, that's embarrassing. It's as though he is this objectified opportunity for me to feel good, to feel connected with a stranger, to experience heartfelt humanity. And that really sucks. Romanticizing poverty and homelessness is downright shameful. Though I'm not sure that's what I'm doing, the mere possibility of my complicity with it - that's something of which I want to be well aware.

Until I moved to Portland, I didn't witness homelessness in such a visible way, so spread out throughout the city. That's not to say there was no homelessness in Salt Lake City - there is/was. But my experience with it was different than it is here. I need to unpack my emotions and reactions as I process this new reality.

Ah, the process.

Food, Health, & Self-Love

This post is rambly. And it's essentially just a reposting of my comment on Chicory's post, linked below. It's in response to three posts that clearly had a strong impression on me: Chicory's Not Giving Up, Something Other Than That at An Accident of Hope; M. Leblanc's Shapely Prose Nails It Again at Bitch PhD; and Kate Harding's The Fantasy of Being Thin at Shapely Prose, the post about which the first two refer.

I am glad to have been reading about self acceptance, fat acceptance, about body image, about health. Glad to be thinking/feeling it. Glad on a lot of levels and for a lot of reasons. Introspection, shame, denial, sorrow, regret, internalized beliefs — lots of stuff going on in my brain and heart. There are lots of things to unpack.

A few years ago, I became a raw vegan. I blogged briefly about my first raw Thanksgiving, my parents' reaction, and a mishmash of links and a video here. A number of factors have reduced my raw intake since then and I’m hardly raw at all anymore. During the summer months my intake of raw food increases dramatically. But you know what keeps me from “doing” the nearly-all-raw thing again? Well, it’s a couple things.

1. I became an annoying proselytizer, despite my best efforts not to be that person and despite disclaimers that I wasn't being that person, erstwhile emailing websites and personal testimonials willy nilly. How grossly annoying.

2. Other people’s reactions to the supposed dangers and how unhealthy it was and how I was buying into a myth of being skinny=being healthy. And/or people saying, “But Moss you look great! Those raw vegans are too skinny! You don’t need to do that!” as if the only reason to eat predominantly fresh, living food is because I don’t like the way I look. That food choice affects how I FEEL seemed so unreasonable it was never considered as the reason I was making my decisions.

>>2.a. Social interactions became very very difficult and awkward and I found myself either coming off as having an eating disorder because I wouldn’t eat anything I was offered or seeming to be a snob who was too good for what food was available.

And you know what? That’s just bullshit. It’s bullshit that 1. I won’t take control of my own propensity to proselytize and 2. that I would seriously let other people affect such a fundamental and personal decision like what to put in my body.

It’s especially bullshit because *I really REALLY like the way I feel when I eat raw vegan food.* I feel better than I have EVER felt in my life (which has led to that #1 proselytizing problem, but that’s not insurmountable if I just get a fucking grip already and remember that what feels good for ME and what works for MY life is just that - MINE).

I won’t even get into what I weighed or my size at different points in time, because those numbers on the scale or on the tags of my clothes are not the measure. The measure is how I feel, and that is incredibly subjective and not readily quantified to anyone outside my own flesh.

What most struck home for me about Chicory's post and about Kate’s original post, was that self-acceptance is so much deeper and more profound and perhaps more difficult than “just” body issues. This new life I’ve created in my new home in a new state has provided me ample opportunity to really look close and hard at who I am, who I think I am, who I project myself to be, and who I would really like to be. Working that shit out might be a lifetime project, but it’s one that I’m finally willing to tackle.

Is thinking/feeling/acknowledging the first steps toward action? I sure hope so.

My Brain Turns WhichWise?

What was most astounding to me about yesterday's rotating image was that when C showed me, we were both looking at the same thing, and seeing her turn in different directions.

That was really cool. The nipples are also a nice touch.

(And see this science-y post for more info about the whole thing.)