Intersexuality, parties, my continuing disease, small town life, and other curiosities.

I am going to a party tonight.  I don't like parties.  I went to a party a couple of weeks ago that had the most fantastic Mariachi band playing and I got to talk with lots of people I really like and the birthday gal is always fun to be around...yet I was so exhausted for a few days afterwords.

I'm never sure if it would make me look better to be so delicate that I fade away at the merest social exertion or if it's better to simply come right out and let people know the whole anxiety/people/parties/noise/too many conversations/and the aftermath of days of needing to hide from people or risk eating their heads off their shoulders like a giant praying mantis.

I still go to parties because I'm easily guiltable by people I like.

So I am going to try not to be a moron and attempt to seem intelligent and not scary.

As you know, you should keep your children away from me because I am a bad influence and might be dangerous.  I might let it leak that I think sin is ridiculous and that basically I won't be devastated if nature gets rid of my weak ass, Darwinian style, in favor of stronger humans.  I also might let it slip that I also wouldn't be devastated if the human race was reduced in number by 75%.  Your children will never sleep again I'm sure.

Anyway...the thunder and lightening this morning was fantastic!  The lightening was so strong it actually seemed to frizzle in the air like a wild sparking electrical cord about to catch fire, which, it basically is.  It's been dark all day and the rain is huge and slanted and the leaves have been littering the air like garbage dumped out from a great height.  This weather makes me very happy to be alive (for as long as mother nature sees fit to let me remain) and this is what makes being alive worthwhile.  To see the atmosphere come undone with the wild winds and wet remnants of summer.

I have somehow been managing to get more posts uploaded to Stich and Boots in the last couple of weeks and I'm very proud of the content that I've been putting up.  Today I posted my friend Lisa E's recipe for ratatouille and the second article in my "Cooking For Beginners" series.  This is the why of my being here.  To share this information, to help people learn to do things that could potentially increase their quality and enjoyment of life.  Hopefully to give courage where courage is needed.

The hopelessness I have been experiencing on the physical front is really no different today but I'm forcing myself to approach each day fresh and not look too far forward at my future as the world's largest woman.  Meanwhile I am eating good food (lentil soup with arugala- even though I don't really like arugala) and trying to bring my mind continuously back to the fact that I am making a lot of better choices for myself now than I was three months ago.  Like all humans I am a work in progress up until my last day on earth. 

A nice change for me is that having shed people from my life who weren't good for me has helped me to feel so much more at peace in this weird community of mine.  I felt so lonely before, trying to fit in where I don't belong.  Now that I have released that somewhat useless tangle from my life I feel lucky to have the friends I do have and it is so much easier to see that I have a truly lovely group of friends here and I still have my very close friends in California.  The warmth from the friends I have who give me so much support and let me be the very messy strange person I am is enough to keep any person afloat.  Not feeling left out of things is a great feeling.

The annoying, lingering, stupid, crappy, and ugly situation that is still living on my mouth is, well, still there...lingering.  Apparently I had a secondary situation possibly brought on by the impetigo, that is fungal.  There's a name for it that I forget.  Since I couldn't afford the medication (a cream for external application)* I have been treating it herbally.  I would very much like to report that my efforts have been successful but you already know, from the sentence above, that it has not worked.  I have been using my antifungal salve (which I've had success with for treating athlete's foot), plus the herbal spray I made for my dog's hot spots, and finally I resorted to dabbing tiny bits of an over the counter antifungal I had lying around...nothing has relieved the cracking of the corners of my mouth.  It hurts.  Not like breaking a bone or giving birth hurts, obviously, but it constantly stings and continues to make me look diseased.

(Another reason to keep me away from your children.  I look mangy.)

All week I've been toying with the idea of finally telling the story about my fight with the chauvinist pig I had last winter which, at the time, I was obliged to say nothing about.

While I can see that my readership is very small and I'm inclined, always, to assume that no one local ever reads it, this is patently untrue.  Aside from the totally cool couple who read my blog fairly often, it seems that whenever I assume no one in McMinnville is looking and I open up about anything- I find myself in an unpleasant social tangle from which there is no very fun solution.

The reason I still toy with, and occasionally do, tell stories or share opinions which either directly involve or allude to interactions with local people is because this is my life, these are my stories too.  My opinions don't need to be shared by the people I live around but I have a right to my view and my blog is the one place I should always be able to tell my own stories.  If I talk about my life here it will inevitably involve others because I don't live in a vacuum.

It seems that even when I actually don't think my opinions are offensive they manage to offend someone.

Like the whole homeschooling discussion/debacle in which I said I thought it was a good choice for some people and that I believe every parent has the right to choose how to educate their own children but that I certainly didn't think homeschooling is without flaws...it seemed to me that I was saying that I'm totally open minded about it but that I don't think it's the perfect solution any more than public school is perfect.  Jesus!  Nothing is perfect!  Anyway- I got in heaps of trouble for that and it turned out to be the obnoxious event that ultimately led to the dissolution of a "friendship".

(I dare to bring it up again because if anyone still has arrows to shoot at me for saying something in this world is just as imperfect as pretty much everything else...uh, you really are just looking for a fight.  Which is always such a great example to our children.)

So, back to the question of the chauvinist.  I actually had a man refuse to do business with me because I am a woman, I mean, isn't that a story that needs to be told?  He's not even as old as I am.  Previously I have only encountered real deeply insulting chauvinists in the over-sixty crowd.  I'm racking my brains to think who (besides the culprit and his loving chauvinist-supporting girlfriend) will be angry with me bringing such an egregious story to light.  Anyone out there know what and who I'm talking about who would like to declare themselves right now and tell me why I shouldn't expose such hideous conduct in a fellow towns-person? 

Maybe it's enough to tell you only that much and say that I have never, until that moment, considered myself a real feminist.  It opened my eyes to the lucky fact that all the men in my circles would never behave in that way since they all respect not only women in general but their own women in particular.

It's really funny how living here has made me know myself so much better than I previously did because of how few people here are really at all like me.  I have found and become friends with most of the people who are.  But being surrounded by so many Christians who take it for granted that I too am a Christian (until I disabuse them of this assumption) has exposed my unease about religion completely.  I could always be comfortable in the Bay Area because religion isn't the glue of the community there.  I have been asking myself lately if I'm actually a bigot when it comes to religion.  I could be so much more open minded about it when I never (or very rarely) found myself around people thanking Jesus out loud and talking about bible school and bible groups and wanting to know what church I attend and even trying to convert me. 

I haven't come up with an answer yet.  I know I believe that all these Christians have a right to believe as they do and I have no desire to prevent them or change them- and this is the whole patriotic anthem in our country isn't it?- but I have almost no patience for people who earnestly talk about the glory of Jesus in ordinary conversations.  I also know, and am not comfortable about this at all, that I respect people a lot less (and think them not particularly intelligent) when their faith prevents them from believing the proofs of science where proof has actually been well established.  Nothing can make me lose respect for a person's intelligence faster than them suggesting that evolution isn't real.

Christians who are at peace with science co-existing with faith I don't worry about nor judge.

Am I a religious bigot?**  I don't know.  Maybe you think so.  Maybe you don't.

I know that many Christians who don't think it's right to terminate a pregnancy because they view it as murder but who don't see it as wrong to use science to create life where god has obviously not wished life to grow*** are irrational and hypocritical.  You can't have it both ways.  If only God can be allowed to bring death than only god can be allowed to create life.  That kind of shit really bothers me.

I know now that I can't be friends with any Christian who thinks being gay is a sin.  I tried to find a way to be ok with that.  But even being complaisant enough about it to hang out with such a person hurt some fundamental part of myself that knows that being gay is just as natural and arbitrary as our gender actually is.  If being gay is a sin then does God expect intersexual humans to never have a sexual existence****?  If God actually demanded that of any human I would have to conclude that he/she is actually unbelievably cruel to create any person with both genders so that they may never love another human without sinning.  I don't see the value in a deity that creates humans that it can only punish because of the body he/she gave them.

But at the base of all of that is the simple fact that no one should care as long as the two people involved are consensual partners. 

So I find my little community here is forcing me to evaluate myself in new and sometimes unpleasant ways. 

Looking at it from a philosophical point of view I can only conclude that this will make me a better person more aware of my prejudices and my own shortcomings which better equips me to improve myself and evolve. 




*It isn't at all expensive but a missing paycheck and the necessity for a complete advance from Philip's bosses made every penny seem like a million dollars. 

**At least from the literal definition of bigot I am not a bigot.

***Since I don't object to women having a choice to terminate a pregnancy if it's the very best choice for her and the potential life inside her, it also doesn't bother me if women use science to create a more hospitable environment for conception.  It isn't hypocritical to my personal beliefs. 

****Perhaps being born with more than one or some unique combination of female and male sexual organs is a gift that we have been too busy labeling as a freakish scary anomaly in the production of the human body to understand and celebrate.  It seems that there is some kind of blessing, or should be, for people who get some of both sexes.  It seems as though such people have been given something extraordinary and it would be amazing if a time came when people revered such bodies as beautiful and intriguing rather than frightening for being so unique.  And maybe people who are born with some of both male and female reproductive organs would grow up healthier and happier if encouraged to be themselves than to have to choose to be either man or woman which is not what they are.  Why can't we allow this?  Why can't we encourage this? 

If an intersexual person felt strongly that they wanted to be more male or more female because that is who they know themselves to be- then it seems right to give them that possibility but what if being intersexual in a world where it is respected as an extra mode of being human rather than something to be hidden allowed a lot of people to explore who they are without painful surgery?  I don't know.  I am not such a person and cannot personally know what challenges and tough experiences and feelings must accompany it.  I'd like to know more though.  I'd like to hear more stories than I have.  Aside from seeing a couple of programs on the discovery channel about it I am ignorant.  But not because I wish to be.

As you can see by this insanely long "foot note" this is a subject I think is important and intriguing and thoughts keep surging up about this.  This isn't the first time I've thought about this either.  I can't say I'd know how to be respectful around an intersexual person while I have so much curiosity and I would want to flood them with the kinds of questions it is only seemly to ask people you know well.  But I would not judge them or be afraid of anyone who had an ambiguous sexual identity.  It would only drive me mad not to be able to get to know them and learn about them.  I would only be able to hope that my acceptance of the diversity of the human form would be obvious to them and that it would also be obvious that the curiosity cannot be helped but a wish to genuinely understand and know someone can never be an insulting desire.

End of foot note.