Walking the Line

I am wary of activism, largely because the idea of forcing a particular way of thinking on an unwilling person conflicts with my personal morality, even if the particular way of thinking is one I support. Do unto others sticks pretty firmly in my mind in these situations. I want to be able to live my life with the freedom to be who and what I am, and follow my own beliefs and ambitions. I don't expect everyone to agree with me or like me; just let me get on with my life. And I reciprocate.

Well. I hold up my end of the bargain, anyway.

Most of my family is pretty conservative. Extremely conservative. God knows how my little pocket of nuclear liberalism came to be, but the rest are your typical Gods, God and Government. The big shock was how accepting they were when I dropped the bombshell on them ten years ago. I've brought partners to family gatherings, and not much is said about the various tattoos, piercings and hair colours I show up with (I can't speak for what's said afterwards, but while we're there it's not an issue, and a lot of times in families, that's what it all comes down to).

There is the cousin who no longer speaks to me because I pointed out that white, heterosexual Christians actually aren't oppressed and that, if you want to drag the United States' founding documents into the issue, nothing even vaguely religious should be integrated with any government institution (schools, court houses, etc.). And her father who did the same because I, as someone who would be unable to afford insurance if I weren't already uninsurable because of a "pre-existing condition" (nice double whammy there; go me!), made a rather angry post about "conservative assholes" (generalised) who don't have to wonder if they can afford proper healthcare not having a legitimate stance to opposed a medical bill that would benefit an awful lot of people currently lacking adequate healthcare.

But those are the exceptions.

Me as an individual - their grandson, nephew, cousin is accepted even if he dresses weird, doesn't go to church, spouts those crazy liberal ideas about equality and is just as likely to show up with a pretty boy on his arm as a pretty girl - is accepted.

Me as a concept - an anonymous face in the mass of alternative religions, alternative lifestyles, anti-gun, pro-socialised government programs, pro-choice, queer, etc. - is not.

It's a difficult thing to manage. On some level, I realise that in voicing their opinions on issues that I support - specifically the ones that affect me like gay rights - it doesn't occur to them in the slightest that what they're saying has a direct impact on me, both in the grand scheme of whether or not I'll actually ever have all the same rights they do and on the more personal level of having someone who claims to love me say that people like me are sub-human.

I don't agree with a lot of the things my extended family believes. Hell, I don't even always agree with my mother's beliefs. But I accept that they are just as entitled to those beliefs as I am to mine and don't persistently try to sway them to the Sashi Side.

Of course, the thing everyone is talking about these days is Chick-Fil-A. I've actually gotten into arguments with gay friends about it because the media is doing what the media always does and I don't agree with that. It goes back to my initial statement. Forcing someone to follow a way of thinking against their will never works out well. What bothers me the most about everyone flocking to stone the company, though, is the number of (gay) friends and acquaintances who up until this point said "I don't care," about the ethos behind the company but, lo and behold! The media starts publicising boycotts and protests and over night "I don't care," becomes "I'm never eating there again".

It just feels a little too artificial, with a hint of witch hunt about it.

I don't support the company - for more reasons than just their stance on homosexuality - but I don't feel very inclined to join the current fray, either. Dan Cathy can believe whatever he wants to believe - and people who agree with him, or just plain don't care, can continue to go there. I don't personally feel the need to jump  in and try to destroy their business. Dan Cathy is not every employee of that company, and, having known quite a few who've worked for Chick-Fil-A, I feel pretty confident in saying that the majority of their workforce (being the crewpeople actually working in the stores themselves) probably aren't in positions where they can quibble about who exactly is signing their paychecks.

Returning to the subject of my family, while perusing Facebook one of my cousins - one of the newer acquisitions that I get along fairly well with - posted one of those silly meme pictures in support of Dan Cathy, and, I'll be honest, it hurt. This is a woman who said I always have a place in their home, who went out of her way to get to know me once she knew I existed, who is still trying to persuade me to move back to San Antonio, who stood with me at my father's funeral supporting a man who thinks I don't deserve to be treated like every other American citizen. I sat there for awhile trying to wrap my head around the concept. I tried to mimic the thinking in my head, to empathise in a way, and I couldn't. A lot of my friends - gay, liberal, alternative, poor, marginalised left and right - don't have  a lot of nice things to say about Christians in general and even while I know the loudest and most powerful saying indefensible things, when my friends start in I'm always there saying no, no - they're not all bad. You have to respect them if you want respect, because I think of the people in my life who hold those values and know they aren't bad people. Just different. In the end, all I came up with was this:

I try my best to ascribe to the 'live and let live' philosophy when it comes to the increasingly prickly arena of religion, politics, lifestyles, etc., but there are moments while watching people show their support for various opinions by happily clicking 'like' where I wonder if, that in the span of that mouse click, the friends, children, nieces, nephews, and cousins personally affected in their daily lives by that opinion cross their minds, or that by supporting that opinion they are effectively saying those friends, children, nieces, nephews and cousins aren't entitled to certain rights - in fact, deserve to be treated as less than. It's not about abstract concepts or philosophies. It's about a real, living, breathing, thinking, feeling human being that you go on vacations with, celebrate with, grieve with, love and are loved by. Maybe more people should think about that rather than competing for who gets to be the most right. 


Of course, immediately after that, the same cousin posted another picture from an LBGT group. Trying to work out the thinking that led there completely short-circuited my brain. 

Ex-Pat Independence

I woke up at 3:40 this morning with "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" running around in my head for absolutely no reason at all. 

Vive la Revolution

National holidays are always a little bit funny when you don't live in the nation that celebrates them. For the most part, you can cobble together something similar, but it's not really the same. Like having work and/or classes on Thanksgiving or fireworks deprivation on the 4th of July (no, we don't go around calling it Independence Day; you're lucky if you even get the 'of July' bit).

I have to say, though, that this year was a bit better than last - all of the citizens of former colonies (US, Ireland, Venezuela, Scotland) waiting on the English guests in ridiculously hot weather (for NE UK); the irony was overwhelming. Though, to be fair, once the English people left, we had a great time sitting outside being distinctly unproper with food, music and general silliness.

We didn't get to do any sort of official thing because of the move - yet another thing that got postponed while we waited for other people to make decisions about our lives - but we went out to lunch to mark the occasion and returned to set about packing up the belongings we intend to take over to the new place ourselves tomorrow (official people come in to do the rest later).

Flags were thrown out the window (to be immediately rained on, thank you, England) and we declared the village conquered.

The New Toy

I also acquired a Pentax K1000 from my step-dad, which I am all kinds of excited about. Apparently he got it for his 21st birthday, so I was informed to sell a kidney before I sold it. I promised I would. The original price tag is still on the bottom and there's film in it. The film is in pretty bad shape, but I'm still going to see if anything can be salvaged from it. Then I need to go about getting the camera itself cleaned up and in working order. The whole thing damn near took me away from packing entirely, but I settled for wandering happily around the house fiddling with it for about twenty minutes before forcing myself to leave it with my Olympus Trip while I finished wrapping up my assortment of odds and ends (which included soot-stained wings, a wooden Buddha, half a plaster skull and a silver flask among numerous other items) and stuffing them into boxes.

I am also no longer sick. Or at least, no longer immobile-y sick. I can deal with not being able to taste anything and coughing fits every ten minutes; I am a smoker, after all.

At some point later there will be another bit of flashing in the form of a supernatural support group. I think. At least I stick with consistent themes. I started writing it on my phone at 4 AM and haven't looked at how coherent what I wrote is yet, so there may be some re-evaluating of my early morning genius before anything actually gets accomplished.

I can set bread on fire with just a bit of parchment.

Yes. I am just that good.
(The oven helped.)

Cooking is something I've always enjoyed. I hosted my first dinner party at 8 (yes, a real proper one with real, proper food and real, proper people. Well. Real people, anyway). The ten years I was on my own I did all the major holiday meals for our patchwork family, and still do Thanksgiving (step-dad enjoys cooking as well so we split holidays). Probably if I enjoyed massively fast-paced working environments and other people messing about in my workspace it would have been a career path, but as it is it's just something I do whenever I have enough people around (ie more than me) to feed.

Being that step-dad has been away, I took over the cooking duties for the weekend and succeeded more or less without incident until tonight's caramelised chicken with ginger bread (which is amazingly lovely, by the way). You have to cut the bread into thin slices and toast them on a baking pan, which I did. But, in preparation for the impending move, the AGA's been turned off so I had to use the oven, which we rarely do and is somewhat perplexing to operate (probably why we rarely use it, not to mention that the AGA is lovely to cook with). While the bread was toasting, I did my customary puttering around, we took the furry escort out for a smoke and generally went about our business. At one point I thought I noticed a vaguely fiery smell, but told myself, nooooo... Nothing could be on fire. 

Then I pull out a pan of flames. With brilliant reaction skills, I took the pan to the sink, then stopped. I couldn't exactly just put the water on, or the bread would get all soggy but there didn't seem to be any other way of putting it out. La-la, fellow firebug, came over to assist, but the same conclusion was reached. Nothing to do but watch it burn itself out. So we very responsibly stood and watched every bit of parchment paper burn up, leaving the toasted ginger bread slices (which hadn't exactly burnt) with a few errant flames which were easily put out with a saucepan lid. 

Fire bread is totally the new thing. 

We've also decided the village (which we are still convinced has a Hot Fuzz-esque underbelly) is really a television show. The village itself is technically two roads, but really more of one L-shaped road because once you go beyond the L you're not in the village anymore. Population-wise, there were more people in my 9 AM lecture on Renaissance lit the last week before Christmas term. In theory, you should walk down the street and always run into someone you know. 

Not so. This occurred to me around walk 5, which meant I'd been wandering around the village with the dog pretty frequently over the past two days, encountering various people on the street and not once was it the same person. I also managed, this entire weekend, to not encounter a single person I know. And I'm pretty sure it was the same black car doing a loop of the village Saturday afternoon just to create the illusion of traffic. So I thought about it, and realised that all the main figures in the village are only seen 1. when in the pub 2. in the post office and 3. in someone's home (namely ours because we live in the big house party house). Naturally, of course, this makes sense. Why put out the money on the main cast as background when you can just pull in extras to people the streets? You don't. You only bring the main cast in to further the plot, and walking down the street (typically) isn't going to do that. Our contracts weren't renewed because the show's demographic found the occasional influx of "those odd, artsy young people" a little too unsettling for their viewing pleasure, thus we've been ousted from the house to make room for the much more conventional nephew of the lord. This weekend's episode, by the way, featured the parents' trip to London, with a brief cut-to of the fire bread incident just to show we haven't disappeared. 

Five minutes away from Darlington station, and La-la had ratted me out on the fire incident. Karma got her back when she drove past the turn off to the village and we took a 15 minute side-trip down the A19 and back. 

I have to say, it was nice having the parents back. This house is entirely too big for one person and the furry escort, or even two people. La-la and I have barely edged out of the kitchen except to sleep (and for her to watch the football match). But the rest of the evening was spent hearing about their trip, David Almond and various stories, with several interjections of bantering, anecdotes and the Sashi and La-la sideshow. As much as I love my flat (and I do very much so, just not the city it happens to be in), and am more comfortable there on a long-term basis, it's easy to forget how nice it is to have to compete with four or five other people to be heard, keep up with a group of highly intelligent and creative people and the general comfort of belonging to a pack. 

My family is a pretty awesome pack, too, if I do so say.