West Side Story: Femme Sharks vs. Femme Hets?

This recent Bitch posting on The Femme Sharks has been on my mind all day. While I do not classify myself as a Femme in the binary Femme/Butch subsubculture of the lesbian community I have always been interested in issues of those who fiercely identify as femme (I also find femmes attractive).

Apart from the manifesto format -- I love manifesto driven movements and/or individuals -- I think The Femme Sharks raise and give voice to some serious issues that have and will continue to face our femme sisters. Tara Hardy, who started Bent: A Writing Institute, has sounded off to this very topic in various spoken word poetry readings. Hardy's poem on the ABCs of being a femme (I heard it at a march or two) was particularly compelling in its unabashed treatment and direct confrontation of femme/butch inequity. "Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity" is another publication out there along the lines of this very topic. It is on my book queue, but I haven't had a chance to get my hands on this book.

It is so refreshing to hear a bevy of voices that only seeks to include rather than exclude women, particularly trans women and women of color. Dare I say this manifesto even defies the confines of the lesbian community? This is a movement for all women, everywhere. We are all of us Femme Sharks.

Salty Tears

This is for Redmond Sea Salt. I have finally exhausted you. I just poured the remainder of your contents into a boiling pot of water and Edamame.

You have been with me since shortly after I moved to Seattle, Washington. I remember enduring ridicule for your gourmetness, your strange, bladder-bag packaging, both you and your biodegradable dish soap sister, Ecover -- though I have since given less scrutiny to my dish soap choices.

You were with me during my first Thankgiving in Seattle, when I took you to a friends house to roast a turkey. I rubbed your coarse granules into the fatty breast of a nameless turkey -- with love, of course.

I introduced you to the woman I am currently living with, who responded, "Woah -- what's this?" I explained, with a mixture of complacency and irritation, what you were and she joined me in using you up. She was from Redmond and your packaging was very deceptive -- I later realized over a breakfast of a hardboiled egg that Redmond Real Salt is not actually made in Redmond, Washington at all, but in Heber City, Utah. You're so real, Redmond Real Salt, like, REAL salt.

Much like beauty products I thought I might not see you to the end. You are the Bhutanese Red Rice Bread and paraben-free body products of today.

It's been a great couple of years, Redmond Real Salt. It meant a lot to me. You've been there for it all. You survived the purge of some of my possessions, furniture, books. You are truly Real. Something to hold on to and something to believe in. I am flattening your little pillow body and rolling you up to take less room in the garbage. I promise to give you a ziplock bag funeral.

Be free, Redmond Real, salt free.

Noise complaint

I arrived home from roller derby practice this evening to find in my email inbox a noise complaint sent to me by the apartment manager of Littlefield Apartments (where I live). Apparently I have been playing my music loud enough that it does not disturb my neighbors on either side of me, but instead the neighbor who lives above me. Said neighbor has come down and knocked on my door when my music is being played too loud, but received no answer.

It may seem like I'm a little hostile, but I must confess I am not. I began thinking back to one time when I thought I heard some small knock on my door, but at the time it was not followed by an additional knock so I registered it as something that possibly brushed against my door. When I opened up this email I was genuinely chagrin that I could be disrupting someone else and was thinking of how loud I play my music at night. What really pisses me off is how passive the entire situation was handled. Why couldn't this person really KNOCK on my door? And why would you not attempt to knock again and LOUDER? I am simply befuddled by someone who didn't even put that much effort into making their complaint known and disgusted by thier highlighting it as a good-heart effort to resolve the situation on their own.

On the way to practice this evening one of my league mates said that last night she had parked her car in this really tight space on Capitol Hill, which is a notoriously difficult place to find parking. This morning she found a disparaging note written on a Starbucks napkin calling her a piece of shit (aparently for her tight street parking job) and she should go back to Massachusetts (her car has Massachusetts plates). How passive can you possibly be? That is the height of passive to me. This story also put my upstairs neighbor's noise complaint into perspective. What is it here that makes people afraid of human interaction and confrontation? And furthermore why are people afraid of any abrupt statements or strange actions?

Now I will have to wonder what tenant(s) in this apartment building finked on me and feel deeply sorry for them.

Foraging

I posted a "strictly platonic" ad on Craigslist last week looking for women to go hiking (the ad was posted to w4w section), preferably during the week since I am presently unemployed and it would be ideal to get out of the house and meet a stranger.

Hiking-w4w-31
I had to put this under W4W, but I'm really open to anyone who would be down.
I would like to do some hiking during the week and possibly over the weekends. I have a car so I can drive most places and if you have a car we could trade off. If you don't have a car I would ask for reasonable contributions towards gas.
I have done some hiking around I-90, in the Snoqualmie/Mt. Baker area, and on the peninsula. With regards to my skill and ability I am somewhere between beginner and intermediate, so if you are a hard core hiker I may not be the right fit for you.
I have everyday open at this point and would like to get out and explore some trails, but don't think its a good idea to do this by myself (although I have before).
If you're interested send me a message and we'll go from there.

I have received several responses to the ad, some of which were more informational than situational. I have set up a hiking trip in the afternoon on Friday to walk along the Snoqualmie Tunnel, which makes me unbearably excited. Completely in the dark with a stranger and a flashlight all along in a creepy abandoned train tunnel.

Yesterday afternoon I met up with a 30-year-old Russian woman and we went hiking on a trail to Olallie Lake in the Snoqualmie/Mt Baker National Forest area. It was a much different hiking trip for me, as I usually stay to the straight and narrow of the trail, whereas she found all kinds of wonderful things off the trail. She exposed me to the rare beauty and characteristics of the Bolete mushroom, which seem to grow along the uncultivated areas around the trail as you reach higher elevations. The underside of the cap is spongey in texture and is vulnerable to collecting lots of water if you try to wash them at home. The stems are bright white and can sometimes be eaten away by worms. The caps are a rich brownish-red in color and comes off on your hands when touching them. While she was looking for unique mushrooms unscathed by worm infestation she pointed out wild blueberries. I began picking blueberries fresh from the branches and discovered them in different sizes.

We reached Olallie Lake and she went off to hunt for more Boletes around the lake region. I sat in the bowl of absolute silence and stillness facing onto Olallie Lake. Only the sound of the ocassional bird interrupted the quiet. It was amazingly clear and crisp as I sat in my sweaty warmth edging toward a chill on a network of eroded tree roots.

After my mushroom foraging friend returned we headed back down still with mushroom and blueberries in mind. We stopped and cleared several bushes of blueberries and I started dropping blueberries into my empty Nalgene water bottle. Blueberry bushes don't put up the same fight as blackberry bushes, so I was more than willing to indulge my scavenging of this particular wild fruit. As we plucked and ate berry after berry the conversation turned towards personal matters and I found her to be just as lost as myself. Job and personal commitments previously converged to obscure and mask her sense of self and she has recently taken a step back from it to make sense of it all. I gave her bits of my personal history, but not the full story. I think it is one that needs to be delivered all at once like a hefty tome of personal history. I have also admitted to myself that those who listen to this story may not have a lot of respect for me after its telling. I'm learning and there is nowhere to go but forward.

As we drove back towards exit 18 on I-90 where my car was parked I felt remarkably calm, but still lost. I wonder if its just easier to be lost here than any other place in the world. Introduced to the world of wild mushrooms and blueberries I realize there are many natural things that exist in the world about which I know nothing.

Who will be your historian?

When I interned at Pentagram Design I worked with this wonderful, intelligent woman who introduced me to a book titled Sister of the road: the autobiography of Boxcar Bertha written by Dr. Ben Reitman and published by Nabat Books. On the inside cover is one of the most wonderful mission statements I have ever had the fortune of reading and instantly glued in my mind until I finally ordered this rare, unsung story.

"Nabat Books is a series dedicated to reprinting forgotten memoirs by various misfits, outsiders, and rebels. The underlying concept is based on a few simple propositions:
That to be a success under the current definition is highly toxic - wealth, fame and power are a poison cocktail; that this era of triumphal capitalism glorifies the most dreary human traits like greed and self-interest as good and natural; that the 'winners' version of reality and history is deeply lame and soul-rotting stuff. Given this it follows that the truly interesting and meaningful lives and real adventures are only to be had on the margins of what Kenneth Rexroth called 'the social lie'. It's with the dropouts, misfits, dissidents, renegades and revolutionaries, against the grain, between the cracks and amongst the enemies of the state that the good stuff can be found. Fortunately there is a mighty subterranean river of testimony from the disaffected, a large cache of hidden history, of public secrets overlooked by the drab conventional wisdom that Nabat books aims to tap into. A little something to set against the crushed hopes, mountains of corpses, and commodification of everything. Actually, we think, it's the best thing western civilization has going for itself."

Trailing my previous post, "Leaders," I think this statement bears the weight of my disorientation. Sister of the road was probably not the best book I have ever read, but moved along much like a boxcar with that ka-chunk, ka-chunk, slow but persistent. I brought away from it an impression of the fundamental freedom of us all, but no emphasis on our responsibility to one another. Responsibility to all, but none to say, our born children, our wives, our families.

Since I finished Sister of the road I checked out The damndest radical: the life of Ben Reitman, Chicago's celebrated social reformer, hobo king, and whorehouse physician by Roger A. Bruns. It covers the life of Ben Reitman and his advocacy for the underclass, the poor, the vagrants, and his affiliation with the International Brotherhood Welfare Association in Chicago, Illinois.

As I am becoming enmired in Reitman's tenuous affiliation with the International Brotherhood Welfare Association I can't help being thrown back to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man with its nameless central character who becomes wrapped up in a socialist organization, a brotherhood, similar to a religious faith. He sloughs off his identity and becomes reborn a "brother" in this larger group who advocate for women's rights, safer neighborhoods, and the welfare of the common man. While the character does become influential in his capacity as a member of the brotherhood, learns their rhetoric, speaks their language, delivers their canned and crafted sermons, as the story unfolds an image of puppetry emerges in the character of Tod Clifton. Clifton goes missing from the brotherhood and the main character later finds him selling little Sambo dolls, proferring the little automaton with a song to make it dance. In a moment of injustice Clifton is shot dead by a police officer, which the main character witnesses, a moment that singularly shatters his externally imposed identity and affiliation with the brotherhood.

"Why did he choose to plunge into nothingness, into the void of faceless faces, of soundless voices, lying outside history? I tried to step away and look at it from a distance of words read in books, half-remembered. For history records the patterns of men's lives, they say: Who slept with whom and with what results; who fought and who won and who lived to lie about it afterwards. All things, it is said, are duly recorded-all things of importance, that is. But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies his keepers keep their power by. But the cop would be Clifton's historian, his judge, his witness, and his executioner, and I was the only brother in the watching crowd. And I, the only witness for the defense, knew neither the extent of his guilt nor the nature of his crime. Where were the historians today? And how would they put it down?"

It would seem to me that social justice is a strange beast with many heads, not always working for the common good of man. When disenfranchised members of society are singled out to be reformed or reenvisioned in whose image are we making them? I make no attempts to approach this question from a sociological standpoint, but find a kinship with Ellison's idea of the historian of the nameless (so much so that I have added a portion of this quote as a tag line in outgoing emails). As an archivist I am interested in all those pockets of recorded history. In this passage it becomes apparent that working for the welfare of the people and the betterment of the communities in which they live means nothing when external forces (police force, gentrification, etc.) conspire to overwrite them and it is their record and their voice which becomes the lasting and true record. It is strange to think of police officers and law enforcement officials as the recorders of history, but strangely, they are indeed just this.

Who writes my history? My bank, student loans, the unemployment office, employers, this blog?

Each & Every

Today I did some freelance archiving work arranging a collection of photographs and I had to leave at 4:30 to make it to a roller derby function at 5 p.m. As I was rolling down 5th Avenue toward 145th Street I drove past a church with a marquee out front with this message:

Read your Bible each day

As I took the turn at 145th Street to get onto I-5 I started turning this phrase over in my head repeatedly. This one church-side exhortation precipitated a flurry of thought over word choice and after practice while I was waiting to retrieve my bag from a teammate's house I began jotting down some notes, trying to determine the difference between each and every. Why "Read your Bible each day" and not "Read your Bible every day"?

As soon as I got home I looked up each and every in the Oxford American Dictionaries utility on my computer.

Every: (adj.)
(preceding a singular noun) used to refer to all the individual members of a set without exception
used before an amount to indicate something happening at specified intervals
(used for emphasis) all possible; the utmost

Each: (adj. and pronoun)
used to refer to every one of two or more people or things, regarded and identified separately
adverb
to, for, or by every one of a group (used after a noun or an amount)

How has every been used? Dollar stores tout "Everything $1," not "Each thing $1," but will indicate "$.99 cents each." Usually it is everybody and not each body. What does every really mean?

Is it possible that every operates as an aggregate, even though this would imply a quantifiable gathering of things, though they may seem like everything? If there was a world in which, say, a roll of quarters encompassed everything (a quarter being the thingness of this particular instance of every) and the ability to count beyond five did not exist, then one item from the roll of quarters would be the each of the everything.

I then started to think of the component parts used in conjunction with every. Everything. Everyone. Everybody. Everyday. Every time. And we dare not forget the morality play, Everyman, by an anonymous author. Every would appear to encompass the universal, the total, a wide, far-reaching net with no limits. Every is a promise, a blank check. It was rumored President Hoover promised, "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage."

Alternately, each is used in a specific manner and usually does not piggyback on the front of other words (I know there is a simple grammar lesson embedded in these lines, but just humor me). Each day I wake up. Each of these girls plays lacrosse. The bananas were 29 cents each. Each would seem to indicate parts of a larger, boundless whole. Each is more intimate, subjective, isolated, quantifiable, knowable, it communicates a deep knowledge about the noun to which it refers.

Is every inclusive, connoting an inarticulate mass, whereas each operates as an exclusive, singling out individual items, but grouping them together as a whole?

I recall Lauryn Hill's song, "Everything is Everything," playing it over and over again on my return drive to Seattle:

Everything is everything
What is meant to be, will be
After winter, must come spring
Change, it comes eventually

Recalling my younger years of Bible study, every would also indicate a boundless quantity:

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
Genesis 2:19-20

It seems as though every is limitless, infinite, even though you could potentially, "have everything," and each is finite, numbered, of a specific, knowable quantity, intimate and personal, a unit of a larger whole.

This brings me back to my original question. Why would this church choose to use "Read your Bible each day" instead of "Read your Bible every day?" Am I to believe the use of each sends a message that the days are numbered, quantifiable, limited, a unit of a larger knowable whole? Yet they are using each in a limitless sense, for what day in the future would each not apply to? Does the word each simply foster a sense of intimacy, community?