There is nothing as lucky

Horrible headaches. It's funny how pain in the head feels so much more a part of me than, say, pain in my foot. They often hurt about the same. Well, not feet so much as hands and shoulders and the muscles all up my back, hurt as much as a headache often does, or sometimes more. And yet, somehow, there is always the impulse to get away from body pain that isn't there with headaches. Like a headache is the only pain that my subconscious isn't convinced I could jettison, if the pain was so bad that I had to, you know, amputate.

Not that I could amputate my back with any success. It doesn't make sense. But I don't know how else to describe this feeling.

If I could write poetry again, I would write about being trapped when you need to fly away, about being trapped by no one but your own self.

an after dinner sleep

I've been reading a lot lately, because I'm beginning to believe that if there is any hope that I will ever be more than an invalid it lies in writing. I used to be a good writer, I wrote poetry and stories that I could imagine other people enjoying if I ever let them read them. All that is gone now, I feel like I've had a lobotomy; I am empty of whatever spark I used to have.

But if it's possible to train to be a good writer, when you don't have a natural skill for it, then I think that the only way to do it is by reading the work of great writers. So, I read. It doesn't seem to be doing any good. If anything, it seems to be swamping my own words with those of others... but since my own words aren't anything much, well.

When I used to write poetry, I worshiped T.S. Eliot; still do, although I have not read much of his work lately. Eliot and Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath have been my favorite poets for a long time. For every point in my life there has been a bit of poetry from one of them that has expressed my thoughts better than my thoughts express themselves. For now, that poem is "Gerontion" by Eliot. I'll put a few lines of it here, in honor of T. S. Eliot's birthday- which is today.

HERE I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.
Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.

Hairy Legs

I've been wiped out and incoherent the last couple of days, feeling like I got run over by a bus. I haven't even managed to read the political blogs like I usually do; I hate this feeling like I'm so dissociated from the world, wrapped in clouds and unable to connect with words on a meaningful level.

One thing that has crossed my mind and stuck long enough for me to grab hold and examine it, though, is the American insistence that women shave their legs.

For some reason- I really have no idea why- the skin on my legs has suddenly become quite sensitive, and whenever I shave I get razor rash, which then gets infected in places and gets all nasty and red, like so:

This is quite annoying, because although it doesn't really hurt that much in the grand scheme of things, every time I shave it happens, and it doesn't heal up between shaves, so it kept getting worse. The obvious solution was to not shave my legs until they get better, so I decided not to. This was about two weeks ago. As the picture above illustrates, they got quite hairy for a while, until my husband expressed his intense discomfort. My hairy legs, he said, were unnatural.

This response is about what I expected, although I did hope that he would relent once I explained that I was just doing it so the oozing sores on my legs would heal up. No such luck. He's a good guy, mostly, but not a liberal hippie the way I am. Questioning everything about the status quo doesn't come naturally to him, and I guess women with hairy legs are so out of the ordinary these days that the average man sees it as unnatural. So I shaved my legs again, so as not to cause a huge fuss.

It puzzles me that a society can get to this point, where the way things would be without outside influence is strange and offensive. People grow hair, it's in our genes; both women and men both, once they go through puberty, are naturally hairy. But if I grow out my leg hair, I'm not a normal American woman, I'm a freak, a butch dyke. When I complain about this in the hearing of my husband or other friends of mine who are male, they always come up with some variant of, well men who don't shave their faces are scary mountain men, so stop thinking you're especially persecuted. However, plenty of men grow out a beard at some point in their lives, just to see what it looks like. Growing a long flowing beard might make people look at you oddly, but men who do this are still men. They're not freaks, their sexuality isn't questioned.

I don't know of a single woman who has ever grown out her leg hair, just to see what it looks like. Even when I was in Africa with TMI, no one's leg hair grew out to it's full length; at one point a group of us girls grew our hair out long enough to wax it off, but mostly we all shaved at least a couple times a week. Even in Africa, we couldn't escape the cultural conditioning that says: body hair on women is disgusting. Its a curious disconnect from the way the world really is, and it puzzles me that more people don't sit back and ask why we do these things. Who decided that female body hair is so awful? Why do we all just sit back and agree to spend so much time and money shaving our skin so we look like infants?

It makes me wonder what other strange ideas might be hidden in my culture, what absurd assumptions lurk just beyond my detection.

More medical drama

This week is shaping up to be quite unpleasant. I had an appointment at the VA on Tuesday, for my claim for increased compensation based on unemployability. The doctor who interviewed me wasn't unpleasant, but they didn't have my records and didn't know where my records could possibly be, so I don't have any confidence in them reaching a conclusion about my medical history that's based on fact. I have another appointment tomorrow morning, with a psychologist I think, where I'm going to have to lay out my theory about how unending pain and crushing fatigue can lead to mental distress and hopelessness. Who knows if they'll buy it; even if the shrink thinks it's reasonable, without my medical records they're likely to conclude that my medical history doesn't uphold a diagnosis of depression stemming from my fibromyalgia.

On top of the loss of my medical records, my appointment tomorrow is at 9am, which means I have to be there at 8:30, which means I have to leave the house at 8:00, which means I have to get up at 7:30 at the latest. Last time I tried to get up so early on bad sleep, my body went into freak out mode. I was getting adrenaline rush ickness from standing in the bathroom brushing my hair. Its like any deviation from a set schedule makes my body think I'm in mortal danger; unfortunately, the irrational reaction to mortal danger makes me nauseous, shaky, headachy, fatigued, and weak to the point where I can barely stand up.

To try to counteract this effect, I've been getting up half an hour earlier each day for about two weeks now, to try to spread the ill effects out and thereby dilute them. It's worked to a certain extent: I have certainly felt ill the whole time I've been doing this. The last few days have been the worst, as I get up earlier and earlier. Its starting to feel like I never actually wake up, I only dream about getting up and feeling ill while trying to go about my life. This morning, I got out of bed, walked to the couch and sat down, and then sat and stared at the carpet for about half an hour. Then I went outside to the porch, sat down on the steps, and stared at the grass for a bit. The fresh air helped some, but I still don't feel like I'm actually capable of thinking more than one coherent thought in a row.

Maybe being half-asleep during my psych appointment tomorrow morning will actually work in my favor; if I can't understand speech due to my inability to comprehend whole sentences at once, surely they will see that something is wrong with me.

I have another appointment on Monday morning, even earlier but closer to home, so I have to get up about the same time. This appointment is for SSA, not the VA, which I think means I'm not eligible for federal disability. If they can't find me eligible based on the 10-page report they got from Laurel Hill saying that I was not able to work in any capacity, I don't think an hour-long medical review is going to do anything but convince them that I'm capable of working. I guess I never really thought they would find otherwise, but it's frustrating. If the people who are supposed to help disabled people find work say they can't help me because I'm too disabled, and the people who are supposed to support disabled people when they can't work say they can't help me because I can work, what do I do then?

Because not everything is dark.

It's a Traffa cat!

There's a shadow just behind me

I used to be the kind of person who was sure that I was right. Always, no matter what, I knew that I had thought things through and seen all the complications and formed the right opinions based on The Way Things Really Were. I was able to get away with this because I was young, and because I was intelligent and eloquent enough that people listened to me with respect even when they thought I was wrong, which only proved to me that I was right. Like many young women, I was not confident about myself in many ways: I thought I was overweight and ugly, and I thought that I was obnoxious and no one would want to be friends with me if they knew who I really was. I still don't know how much of this is true or not; these are things that are hard to determine from the inside, sometimes. But I was always sure that when it came to ideas, I was competent and capable and I knew that people should listen to me.

And then I went and made a series of the worst decisions I could possibly have made in the circumstances; I joined the Army, which was not only a totally stupid thing to do as someone who had ideals about how power should be used, considering the timing of it all, but was also a bad idea on many other, more personal, levels. Then I got hurt, and the whole medical farce played out, and as much as I hate to blame myself, I didn't insist on the kind of treatment I needed, because I didn't know that I was allowed to insist, and here I am today.

Even if I didn't have the fibro fog to deal with, I think I would no longer trust my own judgment. The irritability, inability to concentrate or make small decisions, and poor short term memory are difficult, of course. The impression that my memories are being erased, leaving me without a past longer than a few months, the feeling that nothing that happens is permanent because I know I won't be able to remember it in just a few weeks, is worse. But even if all I had to deal with was the pain, without the doubts about my mind, I would not trust myself. I got myself into this mess all while thinking it was a grand idea; I can no longer be sure about my ability to determine the wisdom of any course of action.

This state of mind has hindered me from accepting that I am disabled, or rather from getting used to the idea. Disability, and the circumstances around it, have destroyed the basis for all the confidence that I had in myself. It seems as though now I'm going about without any skin on, so that everything that happens causes me pain. My body and my mind mirror each other; it is a feedback that can lead very quickly to despair, and I do not know the way out.

My cousin-in-law was paying a handyman to come by and take care of the yard here, before we moved in. After we moved in, he was supposed to still come by every so often, and then she paid him to drain the pool, because it was a stagnant swamp. This was like a month and a half ago.

He finally came by today. The pool is disgusting. It didn't smell before it started draining, but it now smells pretty rancid; in this picture, you can see the mark on the tarp where the water level used to be, and the concentrated sludge of leaves and other dead things that collected since last fall when they closed it up. There's water underneath the tarp, too, and I'm scared to see what it's going to look like when the handyman comes by again tomorrow to finish the job.

In the course of cleaning out the pool, he completely removed all the plants from around it, which I guess is his job. You can see the decimated remains of those beautiful white flowers on the ground here next to the Shop-Vac.

Good thing I'm so emo about plants. It really turned out to be useful in this situation.

Not only did he rip the plants out of the ground, but he chopped them into little pieces as well. I transferred most of the big pieces from the grass to my compost pile. At least one they're composted they can contribute to growing more flowers, someplace else. Like in pots inside.



The side garden was another casualty of the pool-cleaning. I'm not sure if this was planned, or if it got run over by pool equipment first. This one is actually not so bad. The bushes here were really out of control; except for the daisies, which were pretty much done flowering anyway, they would have had to be pruned or replaced next spring. Mulching like this is not much loss, although it was messily done, and looks like a battlefield.

I'm thinking about attempting to turn this spot into a vegetable garden next spring. If we're still living here, I will almost certainly do it, and if we move someplace else but are still in the area I may try as well. I've become rather enthusiastic about gardening since I've moved someplace that seems to consist mainly of concrete and car exhaust. It's really not that bad here, but I do feel a little out of balance without as much green as I'm used to.

Plus cheap fresh vegetables would be neat. Even if it did turn out like amateur gardens often do, with 100 lbs of zucchini and nothing else.

In spite of my pessimism, there are still places where slightly wild things grow. The handyman is coming back tomorrow, but I don't think my cousin-in-law is going to be there; if she isn't, I will do my best to make sure that this remaining ivy is left in peace. It's not even anywhere near the pool.

Our Strategy in Iraq is Revealed

President Bush's reaction to the presentations given by Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker has been surprisingly deft. Not that he's not capable of feeding his cronies talking points and then crafting his own speeches all as part of a master plan; most politicians can do that. What surprises me is how utterly sly he must have been to put this plan together so far in advance.

Clearly, the lesson Bush and Co. took from the Republican defeat in 2006 was that the White House had to provide political cover for Republicans in 2008 or the Republican Party was toast. Of course, the big issue that needed to be covered was the Iraq War, specifically, why American boys were still dying over there instead of living at home with their families. Large majorities of Americans want the war to be over with, want our troops to come home; this is what the Democrats at least pretended to offer, and that's why the Democrats got elected in 2006.

Bush's plan- the surge- seemed totally counter-intuitive when he introduced it. Not only was it not a good idea militarily for a dozen reasons, it also contradicted what every sane person wanted. It turns out, though, that this plan was complete genius. By increasing soldier levels in Iraq to the maximum the military could handle, and then decreasing again to the prior level over the course of 18 months or so, Bush ended up with exactly what he wanted: his propaganda mill will spin this as Bringing the Troops Home while leaving exactly the same number of soldiers in Iraq that were there in 2006.

Even the newspaper headlines are calling this reversion to the situation we had before the surge "troop cuts;" the LA Times headline reads, "Bush says he'll start bringing troops home before Christmas." Who's heart wouldn't lift after reading a headline like that? This masterfully re-defines the situation as a petty political debate about how many troops we should withdraw, and when. For people who don't read their newspapers entirely, who don't troll the internet for clues to what really went on behind all the spin that gets spewed out, it will seem like the President has agreed to leave Iraq, when of course he's done nothing of the sort.

It's almost enough to make me wonder if that stupid smirk Bush always wears is just a tactic to make his enemies underestimate him. He has clearly out-maneuvered the Democrats this time. It's too bad all his slyness is being used to harm the country he swore to serve, instead of to protect and nurture it.

Wilderness

I kind of feel like I should comment on Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker's testimony before Congress the other day, or on my thoughts on the surge, or on Republican sex scandals, or on any number of significant events that have occurred on the national scene on the past few weeks. But, I operate always on a limited energy budget, and so I'm not going to waste effort saying what so many have said so well already: there's a major crisis in leadership going on right now, and if someone doesn't step up to fix it, we're all screwed. Or maybe we're all screwed anyway.

Instead of going on about that, though, I wanted to write about the plants that are growing up through our deck. My husband and I are currently living in his grandmother's house while she is in assisted living, nominally so we can take care of the upkeep of the house but really because we're dirt poor and she's helping us out. It's a nice house, 3 bedrooms and a finished basement and a pool out back. Around this pool, there is a deck, with fencing to keep out small children and make the insurance happy. And since no one lived here for about a year before my husband and I moved in, there are plants growing up from underneath the decking, through the boards to where they can get sun. If it all was left alone, I imagine eventually they would swallow the deck, it would rot down to dirt like dead wood is supposed to, and you'd have a thicket of bushes. Instead of allowing that to happen, I've pulled out most of them (and by pulled out, I mean chopped off, as I don't have the muscle strength to actually pull roots out of the ground).

This one, though, I've allowed to stay.

I've told myself that I'll tear it out once the flowers are gone. I don't know if I will; its my job, sort of, it's part of what I've said I'll do in exchange for living here in a nice suburban house instead of a crappy inner city studio, but it breaks my heart to think of destroying something so beautiful.

I wish I knew what kind of flowers these are. I'm sure they have a name or two, and if I was educated I would know what it is. On the other hand, maybe knowing its name would take away from its beauty. This is a plant that grows where it isn't supposed to grow, life in defiance of order; a name would impose order on it. I think that in some ways, things are less alive when they're more orderly.

All my life until now, I've lived close to wild places. I grew up surrounded by mountains; we weren't that far into the sticks, but the sticks weren't that far from us either. The major attraction of the town I grew up in was the hiking; the next nearest town was famous for its waterfall. When I went to school in Seattle, the ocean was always close; Puget Sound is as domesticated as ocean gets, but that's not saying much. Even when I was in the Army in California, the ocean was right there, you could walk down to it, and hear the seals calling at night from all over the peninsula.

Now, in St Louis, I don't get that sense of wilderness anywhere I've been so far. It's all paved over, settled, obedient land. Even the river is brown and slow and tamed; maybe when there are floods, its different, but I have yet to see it. It doesn't feel right to walk, or, more accurately, drive, around the city, and not see a single thing that isn't firmly under human control. I can't help but think that living without wilderness is a kind of poverty.

I just finished reading Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, by Jon Krakauer, a history of Mormon fundamentalism leading up to the murder of Brenda Lafferty and her baby daughter Erica in Utah in 1984. Its a complex book, and has started me thinking on a variety of subjects, from the nature of religious belief, to my religious upbringing, to the priorities of human rights groups that condemn inhumane practices in other countries while our own government turns a blind eye to the sexual slavery of girls in polygamist communities in Arizona. Unfortunately, my mind works slowly enough that I don't have anything very coherent to say on these topics at the moment.

I will say, though, that this book reminded me that secular people who get hysterical about the Quiverfull movement, or who see it as some kind of right-wing conspiracy to take over the country by breeding little fundamentalists, are way overreacting.

I'm not saying that people who refuse to use birth-control because God Said to Have Kids aren't crazy; they are; they're also incorrect. If you're not allowed to use birth control to regulate pregnancy, you shouldn't be allowed to use vaccinations to regulate child deaths, or cars to regulate how your legs hurt when you walk ten miles. Trusting the Lord to decide the size of your family by doing nothing about it yourself makes no more sense than trusting the Lord to feed you when you refuse to raise your hand to work at growing food. The racism that proponents of these theories often spout is also disturbing. Hectoring white women to have more white babies to save the white race before little brown babies overrun the world is the stupidest reason to have a child that I've ever heard. And people who say things like "They don't believe in God, so they think we have to conserve what we have. But in my belief system, He's going to give us a new earth," to explain why overpopulation isn't a problem, are tragically detached from reality.

However, I've read the Bible, and I'm somewhat familiar with the history of the church, and it seems to me that the one thing you can count on about kids is that they're going to do things that you don't expect, particularly when it comes to religion. Great prophets throughout the Bible are shown again and again to have no control over what their children believe, say or do. Krakauer tells the history of numerous Mormons who decided that their leaders were wrong about essential doctrines, leading to more sects of Mormon fundamentalism than I think anyone has counted. He also tells the stories of girlchildren who grew up brainwashed to believe that they were supposed to be married off as a third or fourth wife at 13 or 14 in order to save their souls, but instead of cooperating talked back, called the cops, or ran off.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you're trying to produce a religious army, having children is a foolish way to do it. Children have a way of growing up and becoming their own people. It's no easier to convince your child that what you say is true than it is to convince anyone else; sometimes it's even more difficult, because children live with you, they grow up in your presence and they know all your mistakes and weaknesses and lies.

Here is no water but only rock

I'm reading this book, A Desert Dies, by Michael Asher, an Englishman, about his travels in northern Sudan in 1982-85. It's quite interesting, and puts me in mind of my earlier post about how humans preserve our habitats. I am beginning to think that Jane Jacobs is overly optimistic in (at least) two ways: she professes a belief that humans are able to preserve habitat in the long run, and she doesn't count genocide as one way we reduce pressure on our habitats.

Desertification is a huge problem in sub-Saharan regions, partly due to climate change but also because of human activity. I first really saw the impact of this when I visited Timbuktu, a city that once was one of the richest in Africa and now can barely sustain itself because the desert has crept down around it and buried it. Overgrazing, changes in plant species and other agricultural techniques, and climate phenomena such as drought or major erosion of topsoil work together to create desert out of fertile land. In Africa, the hardest hit area is the Sahel, the area between the barren sand-sea of the Sahara and the fertile jungles of the south, as shown on this map. The effect is even more clear on this satellite map of Sudan. The dry, yellow north blends into the soft, green south along a ragged border.

Interestingly, if you look at maps of the current genocidal conflict in Darfur, the areas of conflict neatly line up with the area where the desert meets arable land.

There are obviously more factors involved in the Darfur genocide than only the presence or lack of water. Religion is a powerful force in the region, as it is everywhere. The north of Sudan is primarily Muslim, while the south is a more diverse collection of animists and Christians, who are less fond of sharia law. There is a significant ethnic divide between the southern black African tribes and the northern Arab-African tribes. This ethnic divide has a long history: before European colonization, Arabs took black Africans as slaves, and Asher wonders whether the practice continues clandestinely. The party of Arabs with whom Asher traveled always refers to their non-Arab countrymen as 'slaves.' On top of that, the northerners are primarily nomadic herders, while the southerners are primarily farmers. This economic division may be the most severe.

Asher quotes one older member of the party:

I do not like this country. These slaves stop us watering our herds. They hold us back at the watering-place and say, "The wells are dry!" or they tell us, "Pay us money and we will let you water!" Curse their fathers! In the old days the Kababish would not come near this land of blacks! The grazing was good in the north then. .... The best ranges are gone and we come further south every year. ... Every day we remain here, we run the risk of losing stock [to theft]. Those [farmers] have no honor and they do not fear God.

This makes me think that no one division can be separated from the rest. If the racism were eliminated, the religious bias would remain. If the religious bias were eliminated, the economic bias would remain. If the economic bias were eliminated, the historical injustice would remain. And if all else were eliminated, still the desert would remain. It is entirely possible to view the situation as an environmental correction, as evidence that the current population cannot be supported on the failing land, and the pressure on the habitat is causing the culture to burst at the seams.

Which raises the question: should we try to stop the genocide? Can we even hope to stop it, try as we may? If desertification leads to war, should our efforts go to peace or to responsible stewardship of the land? Or perhaps, instead of trying to broker a peace deal so that all tribes can live peacefully together, should we forbid anyone from living in this area? If the pressure that causes conflict is so fundamental to the area, perhaps the only way to solve it is to remove everyone from the area until the land can recover. If our natural impulses that work to preserve the land are too horrific, maybe humanity as a community needs to approach the problem rationally instead of instinctively, and consider major changes to the way we deal with crises of all types.

The Storm

I remember once when I was 13 or 14, in the fall, there was a series of violent thunderstorms in the Valley, huge crashing storms, that felled trees and flooded ditches and roads. I was fascinated by them, as I've always been fascinated by storms, and one evening I slipped outside to go for a walk in the rain, without a jacket or umbrella. I was soaked through in seconds, the rain came down in sheets and blurred my glasses so I couldn't see, and the wind made it difficult to stand upright. It was glorious. The sheer energy of it was amazing, I could smell it in the air and feel it on my skin, and somehow it drew me outside in spite of the miserable cold and wet. That storm had an essence of wildness, of alien, other character. I stood in the middle of it and couldn't touch it, no human could tame it, it was purely out of mortal control.

I'm still in love with storms. The smell of thunder on the air is one of my favorite smells; in all the world it is the only thing that makes me alive when I'm tired.

Serving Your Country

Sometimes, when I feel like making myself feel sick- you know, when my GERD/IBS isn't doing that for me already- I contemplate my outstanding disability claims.

It's been two years now since I was medically discharged from the Army. As soon as I got out, I put in a disability claim for the stomach problems I had pretty much the whole last year I was in (and which I still suffer from). Throwing up all the time, cramps, bloating, gas and heartburn aren't enough to make you totally disabled, of course (although the esophageal cancer GERD can cause will often actually kill you), but the VA, unlike Social Security, grades disability on a percentage scale, and will often give small payments for minor things. A retired Sergeant Major I used to know gets 10% disability for a tiny scar on his ear; visible scarring is considered disabling, even if you can barely tell it's there. So I had a legitimate hope that even though I was not a Sergeant Major, someone in power would think that I was entitled to something for my constant illness.

It's been two years, and I still haven't heard back from the VA about whether or not I am entitled to disability on this matter. First they told me that because I didn't have a clear diagnosis, I didn't actually have anything wrong with me. I was tempted to go and vomit on the desk of the person who made that decision, but instead just appealed it. They got my appeal paperwork and treated it like a brand new claim, telling me that I would have to prove that I'd had the condition since I was in the military. Never mind that all of my medical records are either military or VA, I had to request copies- from them- and then provide them with those copies.

I'm back in the waiting phase, again. I suppose sometime they will have to make a decision, and I assume that if they even glance at my medical records, they will see that I'm entitled to compensation, because I am. I joined the military in good faith and got wrecked while trying to serve my country, and I know that that's true no matter how many bureaucrats deny it.

When I'm not vomiting bile (ha!) over frustration with the system, I daydream about what I could buy with the back pay I would get if the VA found in my favor. I am fully disabled by my fibromyalgia and unable to obtain or keep employment, according to two government agencies and one non-profit tasked with helping disabled people find work, but VA regulation only allows a finding of 40% disability for fibromyalgia, so I live on $556 a month. A finding of only 20% disability for my GERD/IBS, just one step up from a tiny scar on your ear, would net me back pay of $5400 for the two years I've been waiting.

There are a lot of things I could spend $5400 on, but I think my highest priority is dental care. I daydream about getting my teeth cleaned; I could even get a few cavities filled before that money ran out! Screw new clothes and a tattoo and a haircut from someone other than my mother, dental care is my big dream.

Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I hadn't joined the Army. I probably would have finished university a couple years ago, maybe gone on to post-graduate work if I found something that I found more interesting than the rest of the world. Maybe I'd be working at a real job, with health insurance and so on. Maybe not. Maybe I would still worry about not being able to save my teeth, maybe I would still be disabled in some way. There is definitely enough doubt in me, though, that whenever I see ads enticing young people to join the military, it makes me see red.

Electronic Friendship

This morning I took two friends to the airport, to see them off. They'd been visiting us since last Friday, and I was still heart-sick to see them go. We actually had several other people over as well, but these two were the last to leave; and now I'm all alone again.

I have never been good at making friends. In fact, I've been so bad at it that I've wondered at times if I'm damaged somehow, if perhaps I have some subtle form of autism or something that prevents me from interacting normally even with people I like and want to get to know. The past couple of years have been something of a miracle for me, then, because I've made these friends, and they are real and dear to me. There are a lot of factors that made this possible, but the key ingredient, I believe, was World of Warcraft.

I played WoW from around January of 2005 until about a month ago. Unlike many people, the entire time I played, I hung with the same group of people. They started out as a group of strangers, only a couple of whom I knew and those only because my husband played EQ with them years ago. But over the course of time, I managed to get involved in the lives of people I never knew before. I joke sometimes that I don't have a social life outside of a computer, but the truth is, I've never really had a social life before at all. Now, with my fibro pain and fatigue dragging on me on top of my basic shy and unfriendly nature, I think I would be entirely alone were it not for the universe that rests at my fingertips here.

Unfortunately, for many of the people who played WoW from the beginning, the game is growing old and stale. A lot of people have quit playing just because they're so bored, and my friends have all tended in that direction, with an added dose of jobs and school and marriages preventing them from spending time online. So everyone quit, some earlier this year and some later, but it was a cumulative effect, and by the beginning of August the guild was disbanded and people's accounts were canceled. And I was all alone again. So, my husband and I invited anyone with vacation time to spend it at our house.

Its the strangest thing, meeting someone for the first time when you've been good friends for years. After I got over the shock of looking at people straight on, the strangest thing was figuring out what name to say. Because everyone there, except for Rob's wife AJ, who never played WoW with us but was welcome anyway, had at least two names. For some people it was easy: Ted, for example, has always been Ted, through multiple character names and since before WoW existed. Jard, on the other hand, has always been Jard, and not Don, because he doesn't even look like a Don and no one even knew that was his real name for the longest time.

Almost everyone called me by my real name, also, because when we all switched servers in the beginning of 2006, I had to change my character name and no one liked typing the new one, so the old one stuck for a while and then people just started calling me whatever they wanted. The only exception was Traffa, who called me Bottle, which hasn't been my character name in a year and a half, but I kept calling him Traffa and not Raymond, so I guess it's fair.

It was a wonderful time, and now they're gone again, and I don't know what I'm going to do. Muddle along as usual, I guess. These people live all over the country, so I think the only thing to hope for is that another interesting MMO comes out soon, so I can once again meet people in a world where the barriers to interaction are low enough for me to cross.

Science Fiction and the Other

I've been reading Pam's House Blend off and on the past week or so, and it's been making me think. Her section on hair styles, specifically the implications of straightening or not straightening your hair if you have African hair, is particularly fascinating. Apparently there are people in the world who make a moral distinction between straight and curly hair. This shocks me a little bit. The idea that respectable, thinking people still care about race, still categorize people based on skin tone is almost unbelievable.

Believe it or not, it wasn't clear to me until recently just how prevalent racism still is. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, about an hour out of Seattle, and although my parents in many ways are religious nuts, the only categorizing I ever heard either of them engage in was Christian v. non-Christian, and even then non-Christians weren't worth less as people, they were the focus of Christ's love. I used to think that this attitude was pretty much normal for educated, intelligent people. I was aware that in parts of the country there were still people who thought African-Americans were stupid and lazy, but I assumed that no one took these people seriously, because they were obviously cracked.

Some of this, I think, was the area I grew up in. There wasn't the residue of hate from ages of slavery to deal with, and the racial divisions were based on less vitriolic things. Instead of there being this line drawn between white and black, there were many lines, most of which were really blurry, between white, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Thai, Native of infinite varieties, etc. So the biggest historical racial inequity was the genocide of the Natives, and even that was mostly accidental, through the introduction of diseases white settlers didn't realize they were carrying and so on. I remember being taught in school the story of the Whitmans, missionaries who began a mission in western Washington and ended up slaughtered after the tribe they were supposed to be saving ended up mostly dead from measles, as a parable of European arrogance and stupidity. I don't know why it was easier to demonize white missionaries than white slave owners, but it was.

The other major influence on my thinking about race, however, was my love of science fiction. By the age of 16, I read almost every science fiction book in my local library, and often read an author's entire canon by ordering books from the county library system. I was fortunate that the county I lived in included Seattle, which meant a ton of money for artsy things like libraries. A lot of it is a blur by now, but I remember at one point, I must have been 12 or so, reading a short story in this huge grey book full of great short stories from the whole history of science fiction. This particular story was written in the 70s sometime, I think, as a reflection on the civil rights movement. It was very simple: aliens had made contact with Earth and wanted to see how regular people lived, so they went out to restaurants and things. I believe these aliens were tall and blue and quiet. The story was told from the point of view of a waitress at a restaurant one of these aliens visited, basically speculating on what he felt and how he reacted to the people he met treating him with disgust. The message was, what's so special about us that we feel we have some right to treat them as though they're dangerous and untrustworthy and evil?

It's difficult to read science fiction for years and still hold onto us v. them thinking. The whole genre explores the idea of the Other and the Different and the Strange, seeking to know what these things are like. And after all, to know is to love, is to hate, is to be, is to eat... just ask Mr. Heinlein.

Which is why it's so striking to me to live now in St Louis, which claims to be the Midwest but really looks like the South to me in many ways. People here who are educated and smart and liberal still believe that black people are fundamentally different than white people. It's not correct to claim that black people are stupid or lazy or can't swim or are prone to violence, not really, but they are still an Other group. Its ridiculous. It really bothers me that not only can I not say that I wish I had a classical North African bone structure so that I could shave my head and still look beautiful, people who actually have North African bone structure still feel pressured to imitate 'white' hairstyles so that they're socially acceptable. I wish I could do something to change things.

August 21

I often have trouble tracking time. I lose any sense of what time it is, or what day it is, along with my ability to tell the difference between what I've done recently and what I've thought about doing but haven't actually done. I often find myself panicking because I don't know whether my medical appointment is tomorrow or next week or next month, and on occasion I miss appointments because I forget that I haven't already gone, or I forget that they're not next week, or I forget about them entirely. In short, I am not much for anniversaries.

Which is why it's rather odd that I'm writing this today, considering that it's the 15th anniversary of the killings at Ruby Ridge. I think that perhaps these events are not common knowledge among the general population, so here's a summary. The Weaver family were religious nuts who believed, among other things, that the world was about to end in a gory Apocalypse, so they moved to a cabin in northern Idaho to separate themselves from the sinful world etc. They had a lot of guns and may or may not have been white supremecists. Regardless, they didn't hurt anybody. Randy Weaver was entrapped by an undercover cop into selling the guy two sawed off shotguns that may or may not have been illegal, and then was given the wrong court date to show up for a hearing.

When he missed the date, local law enforcement called in the FBI and the National Guard and something like 400 people descended on the Weaver's property. There was a standoff that lasted for something like two weeks, during which the government shot dead Sammy Weaver, age 14, in the back as he was running away and Vicki Weaver, while she was standing in the doorway of her house holding her infant daughter. Eventually it all went to court, Randy Weaver was convicted of not showing up for his court date, several FBI agents were reprimanded, and the surviving Weaver children got $1 million each on out of court settlements.

The reason I bring this up is the recent conviction of Jose Padilla for conspiracy to murder etc. Mr. Padilla in many ways is in a situation similar to the Weavers: he held beliefs that anyone would consider to be antisocial, but did not hurt anyone; he practiced his religion in an unconventionally serious way that removed him from regular society; the government took advantage of his position outside mainstream society to treat him as someone without the rights of an American citizen; he is permanently damaged.

There is no doubt that he was held without charge for years and treated in an inhumane manner. The more I learn about the techniques used on him, the more I am convinced that they constitute one of the most horrible torture systems known to man. Vicki Weaver may in some sense be less lucky than Mr. Padilla, but I am not so sure. There are fates worse than death, and the psychiatrist who interviewed Mr. Padilla for the defense thought that he may have been introduced to such a fate. Many people are, understandably, upset about this.

What puzzles me is the reaction, evident in this piece from Firedoglake as well as many other places in the 'liberal blogosphere', that says that because the government is currently Republican-controlled, in order to prevent this kind of thing happening in the future we ought to work very hard to elect Democrats. This kind of innocence about how power works reminds me of myself, when I was very young. I used to think that political upheaval would be useful; I even campaigned for a Libertarian one year in the belief that many of the problems with modern politics stem from the two-party system. And perhaps destabilizing the elite would have some interesting effects.

However, in my cynical old age (and oh, I am old these days) I have come to a different conclusion. Power is corrupting. This is a very simple idea that most people will agree with, but it's painful to follow it to the end. No matter how honorable your candidate for Congress is, in the end, electing new people to the same system of power will have zero effect on the level of corruption in the system. Maybe one person will hold onto their honor, maybe another will continue to believe in their ideals, but in the aggregate there will be no long-term positive effect of introducing new blood. It will only decay again into the same patterns, the patterns dictated by the system.

The only solution is to burn the system down and start again from the beginning.

A Little Story about Occupation

Suppose for a minute that you're living in an anarchist society, with no central governing authority. You have your family and hangers-on in a compound with barbed wire and dogs and so on, and then on down the street there are other people in their compounds and generally things are moderately peaceful because this is an old anarchy and people have realized that starting fights is a dumb idea when the other person is as heavily armed as you are. Most fights, in fact, are inside of compounds, which are mostly run in an autocratic manner by the head of household, when some youngling decides they don't want to obey anymore.

Now, imagine that you hear of a compound a ways away from yours, small and poor and run by a real asshole. And the rumor is, this guy is a real piece of work, abusing everyone he can get his paws on, from his own children to the beggars outside the back door of his kitchen. This guy is so bad that he rapes his daughters, castrates his servants' children, tortures his wives and slices the toes off his nieces and nephews. Being a wise, kind and good anarchist, this bothers you, and on top of that you think this guy might secretly support your worst enemy.

So you take your homies and go down the road a ways, climb their wall and drag their leader from his bed and put him up against the wall and shoot him. His kids and wives and servants are just as mean and shifty as he is, but you figure you really shouldn't shoot them because it wasn't their fault their leader was an asshole, and anyway you want to put them to work, for you. Because after all, someone has to pay for their liberation.

What you didn't count on was the fact that the old geezer kept control by turning everyone in his household against each other, which makes people real hostile once the controlling force is gone. So they fight amongst each other, and things get nasty and you kill a great number of them, feeling guilty all the while. But somehow killing more people never makes the rest of them like each other any better, and while they'll act properly cowed in front of you as soon as you turn your back they're at it again, and on top of that the neighbors are all really pissed off at you for turning the view from their bedroom windows into a messy war zone. You've got yourself into a position where you can't stay; it's expensive and not working and making everyone mad at you and anyway, being wise and kind and good, you don't really want to kill everyone in the house, which is what its going to take to make them stop fighting. You also can't leave; these people demonstrably will kill each other if you do, and you can't in good conscience allow it; anyway if you did allow it your reputation would suffer miserably and you'd lose a lot of money in all your other endeavours. You're stuck.

So lets back up. Instead of breaking into this place and shooting it up, you stand outside it, with lots of guns and a bullhorn. And you announce, everyone in this situation that we find so horrible: if you'd like to leave and become a part of our peaceful and prosperous commune, come along and commit to being peaceful and prosperous and we here with our guns will make sure you get out OK. We'll escort you back to our place and get you settled in, but be warned- if you fight among yourselves or with us, we'll kick you back out again.

Once you announce this, and all of your enemy's people have abandoned him, the situation still isn't perfect. But you've gained a collection of very grateful and enthusiastic new commune members, and your enemy has lost his infrastructure base, and you're not pouring your money into buying more guns to kill more people way down the street somewhere. Your liberal bleeding heart is satisfied and you haven't actually had to kill anyone, let alone get stuck in a situation you can't improve and can't end and can't leave.

This is why people who say we should stay in Iraq for the sake of the children, like this guy, quoting Ambassador Crocker (via Digby):

"How will we feel if the movie doesn't stop, even though we've pressed the 'stop' button? What if the movie just goes on? And gets even uglier? And even uglier after that? .... We're talking here about the possibility of thousands of deaths, about religious cleansing operations, we're talking here about the possibility that there could be no Sunnis left in Baghdad because they'll all have been murdered, driven out or expelled. Is this what we want? And who will explain that to Americans?"

are totally wrong. I guess my point is, we can't stop ethnic cleansing if a community is determined enough to want it in the first place. All we can do is try our best to get people out of the way of the beast. Occupation is a very bad way to accomplish this; so bad, that I don't think it will even allow us to accomplish anything.

The Crow

If I do get a tattoo of a bird (which is to say, if the VA ever gets me the back pay they owe me, the bastards), this is what it would look like.

Flight

Via Pam's House Blend, I found this 60 Minutes special, about homosexuality and gender. The most interesting clip I think is the one on the twins Adam and Jared, that claims that one of these 9-year old boys has a problem with his gender. The interviewer asks, if you were to tell a stranger what kind of person you are, what would you say? and Adam answers, "I would say.... I'm like.. a girl." and shrugs. It's evident that he's been told by adults in his life that he should think about himself in a certain way. The video includes a clip of his mother mentioning, with a very stressed affect, that she first noticed that something was 'different' when her son was 18 months old and he asked for Barbie dolls instead of GI Joe dolls. Other evidence that Adam has a problem: he plays with Neopets, stuffed animals, and likes pink and purple. Jared, on the other hand, is suitably male with firetrucks and toy soldiers and a Marines poster.

Now, its possible that this kid really is a homosexual and that his mother really did know that when he was 18 months old. I guess its a sign of social progress when a mother who suspects that her son is a homosexual buys him stuffed horses and Barbies instead of freaking out and beating him bloody, no matter how distressed she might be. I can't help but think that confining children to strict gender roles from very early ages isn't be all that beneficial, though. It's not as though a preference for firetrucks is something that is genetically male, or a preference for pink and purple is something that is genetically female. Firetrucks have only been around for 100 years or so, and back in the day purple was the color of privilege, more often worn by men than women. Forcing kids to think that they're stuck in the wrong body because of a "nontraditional" toy preference is something that comes very close to abuse, in my opinion.

Kids at play shouldn't have to fight these silly cultural battles. When I was nine, I wanted to be a knight errant. Not because I wanted to be male, but because I wanted to be a hero. I had read a lot of fairy tales, so I knew that knights got to do all the really neat stuff, like travel and be champion fighters and rescue people and make hugely important decisions about good and evil and so on. I did have some vague desire to be a princess as well, but my favorite princesses were the ones who rebelled against their pampered life, ran away dressed up as boys and became knights. My father made my brother and me swords out of wood scraps spray painted silver, and my mother made us stick horses out of broom handles and felt, and we ran around the yard hitting each other and no one ever told me that the joy I took in playing meant I was a lesbian.

Which is probably a good thing, because if I couldn't be a knight, what I wanted most was to be a dragon. Dragons had all the positives of knights- they were strong and wise, they featured prominently in interesting adventures, they sometimes even had magical powers- and on top of that, they could fly. Flight has always fascinated me, the pure freedom of it. When I gave up on being a dragon, because after all dragons are completely imaginary in a way that knights and princesses aren't, I decided that I wanted to be a bird. I daydreamed about it, about being small and light and flying over the tops of everything, able to go anywhere and see anything. I even went to the library and checked out those topical illustrated encyclopedias they make for children, to learn about flight and birds' skeletal structure and muscle systems and feathers. For a while I was mildly obsessed.

I managed to make it to adulthood without thinking that I'm a bird, though. I can't honestly say I love my body, but that probably has more to do with the relentless grinding pain and defeating exhaustion I've carried for the past four years than with any sort of body dysmorphia. I did get a tattoo of a dragon on my hip as soon as I turned 18, and I've been considering getting a tattoo of a crow if I ever have the money for it. It took me longer to give up on my dream of being a knight; I joined the Army with the intent of becoming a warrior, and there is still a part of me that hungers for it in spite of everything. I do think I'm lucky to have had parents who encouraged me to be whatever I could dream of instead of telling me who I was. It makes me sad for poor Adam, that there are no adults in his life willing to accept that he can be gentle and creative and still find his own way as the person he is.

The Preservation of Human Habitat

From The Nature of Economies, by Jane Jacobs:

Think about habitats people have dwelled in and altered but haven't destroyed. Ask yourself, 'Why haven't they?' After all, people could have destroyed them...

And yet in most places, most of the time, people have managed to avoid destroying their habitats, including many they've occupied long and continuously. What could possibly have restrained our species? Something did, or else much of the earth, long, long since, would have been laid waste, then laid waste again as fast as it recovered- when it did recover. I'm speculating that our evolutionary endowments, like those of the great cats, elephants, bonobos, chimps, and others, must include traits that check habitat destruction.

Jacobs lists several possible human traits that could contribute to our failure to destroy the world (so far), including "the capacity for aesthetic appreciation," "fear of retribution for transgression" which she says covers both primitive superstition and modern scientific fear, and the propensity to engage in alternate occupations that don't affect the environment, such as talking or having recreational sex - she compares us to bonobos and chimps with their habit for sitting around grooming socially instead of eating everything in sight. She also includes "our inborn capacity to tinker and contrive" which I am less persuaded by. If human tinkering has in some cases relieved stress on the environment, it has certainly increased environmental stress in as many or more situations.

It's an interesting idea, that humans may in some ways be evolutionarily predisposed not to destroy environments when we have so much evidence that in fact, humans destroy environments. I only have to look out my back window and see the little rabbit that lives in my neighborhood making its way from one perfectly manicured lawn to another, for as far as the eye can see, and imagine the prairie that rabbit ought to be living in to understand that. And yet... the world is not a barren wasteland, devoid of all but cockroaches. Humanity certainly has the power to make the world a wasteland, or worse: with the nuclear weapons the United States owns, we could reduce the Earth from a planet to a large and mobile asteroid belt. And we haven't, yet. Obviously there are reasons why, and Jacobs has started me thinking about the idea, and what possible characteristics might be humanity's salvation here.

An ability to engage in long-term thinking seems to me to be right up there with aesthetic appreciation for why we don't destroy our own habitats. Even societies whose habitat modification only extends to domestication of herd animals know that allowing your sheep to eat every damn piece of grass in the field means next year you won't have any sheep. Long-term thinking plus basic self-interest means stewardship of the land, not raping it. But on the other hand, things don't always work out that way; Jacobs gives the example of cod fishing in Newfoundland, where scarceness of cod drove cod prices up, inciting cod fishermen to actually invest in cod-catching boats and such, leading to complete devastation of the ocean in that area in the early 1990s.

Earlier today a post I read on Balloon Juice made me consider another human quality that might act to preserve the environment. It was this post, comment #17, and it says, speculating on possible reasons for the invasion of Iraq, "It is a fairly safe assumption that they didn’t give a fuck about the various factions in Iraq. Some days I even doubt they care all that much about the oil and suspect they were just in a mood to trash a country. From a safe distance of course."

Whatever you think about the war, and whether it was begun over oil or family pride or foolish, misplaced idealism, consider that no one would read that and think, "But it's just not possible for someone to want to trash a country for no reason! People don't like to destroy things unless they really have to! Violence is something that you can only force into human discourse as a means to a good end!" Fact is, people do in fact like to destroy things, particularly other human things. And by things I mean people. Human history can be pretty accurately described as a series of violent atrocities committed by one group of humans on another, for a multitude of reasons, for as far back as we have records. It is still, in this enlightened age, somewhat counter-cultural to posit that war may be inherently evil.

The human desire to kill and/or disenfranchise large groups of other humans may not be a shoo-in for a characteristic that strongly defends the environment. War does have a nasty tendency to damage the air, water and land as well as those living on it. However, as Malthus said so long ago, war is a key check on human population, along with disease and 'immorality' like homosexuality and contraception. The bloodiness of the 20th century has surely reduced world population by large amounts. Anything that curbs human population growth, I would think, has some benefit to the rest of the environment.

Writing this, I am aware that it sounds morbid and cold, and it is. I am not even sure if its true or useful to view the situation this way. Fortunately, I'm not someone who has to worry about whether what I say is true or useful before I think out loud- or in type. Besides, I'm certainly not the first person who has ventured this opinion.

There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire.

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly.

And Spring herself when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

- Sara Teasdale, 1922