outer-jessie's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Her old self, or someone else's. I don't know why I let other people's emotions, or perceived emotions, become my own. Why it seems like an obligation to feel what they feel. When I stop and tell myself that that is not my responsibility, I feel guilty about that. Guilty for not feeling their pain for them. Once upon a time, a little girl died. She was four. I wondered how I would ever, ever get over it. I wondered if that pain would ever go away. Then this came to me: this was not my pain. I did not know this little girl. I had never met her. It was very sad what had happened, but it was not my place, not my obligation to feel that sadness. It was very hard for me to accept that, and I still feel guilty as though I've shirked my responsibility. But that's how it has to be. Similarly, I can't expect other people to feel my pain for me. That was meant to get me back on track to what I actually wanted to say in this entry. Let's see. I was awoken by an overabundance of darkness and quiet last night. The power was out. It must have been about 2 am; I couldn't go back to sleep because my fan couldn't work, my alarm would have to be reset, and a mouse was exploring the full expanse of my little apartment. As annoying as THAT was, I have to admit it's pretty hilarious to hear tiny tiny feet carrying a tiny tiny body hither and thither over the carpet. Small things make me laugh (ever seen documentaries of baby bears? oh lordy) even if they're unwelcome entities. I ended up being glad of the company when the fear of the looting and pillaging of my apartment was spawned by the shouting of male voices and screeching of car tires outside my window during the black out. Often, the advantages of living at ground level (which are virtually nil, unless you hate climbing stairs) are tremendously overwhelmed by the disadvantages. I do not like being afraid. The power came on again at 2:22. I reset my clocks and happily returned to the business of sleeping. Unfortunately, the business of sleeping did not return to me. I lay awake for another couple hours, being wholly dissatisfied with the positions of all my limbs and every other body within a 500 lightyear radius. I was hungry (nice appetite surpression, diet pills) and sent myself to the kitchen on the impetus of two glaring headlights beaming straight into my windows. Who's parked in the middle of the street with their lights on at 4 in the morning? Amidst further prophecies of looting and pillaging, I ate a bowl of apple cinnamon Cream of Wheat and watched some episodes of Donald Duck cartoons from the sixties. I finally fell asleep again at about 5, which also happens to be about how many hours of sleep I got. Eh. I'd been thinking of fabulous things to write in here and tell you all, but of course they're all forgotten now. Hm. Well there is this one thing I still remember. An anecdote relating to gender boundaries; now I'm not sure how relevant the point I intended to make with it is. For what it's worth: When I was in the sixth grade, my teacher read us a short story. The story itself is long forgotten, but what I said about it, I still recall. She asked us to comment on things we found surprising in the narrative. I said it was unusual that the mother drove the family car and the father was the passenger. Normally, said I, it was the father who drove. Not so! said everyone else. Many of them had mothers who customarily drove; my teacher said it was she who drove the family car. I was twelve years old at the time: old enough to realize that "the way things are for me" is not necessarily "the way it is". Yet I had used my own personal experience to extrapolate an arbitrary and false gender boundary for the rest of the world. And that's the comment I want to make about gender boundaries in general: they are arbitrary and false. There ARE differences in the sexes that are biological and based on the hormones present during fetal development, but there are a great deal MORE differences in the sexes which come about after the child is born, based on how it is treated due to its sex. And the treatment, and the assumed limitations based on gender, are, as I see it, arbitary, and false. I hate to see them cropping up. I hate even more to say this, but...watch Friends. That show is diabolical about pressing gender boundaries, especially on the male characters. It's revolting. That's why I'm pleased with the gender-nonspecific pronoun, g. :) It's basically just a pronoun meaning "person", only shorter. G's is the possessive, and we haven't yet created the object case (replacing "him/her") but I was wondering if maybe it could be gok? How can you say no to gok? Lots of gender-nonspecific pronouns have been suggested for the English language, with no success. That's not what this is. This is just for fun. It's for all the gs in D-land. I'm proud of the g. Of course I'm also proud of the squeezy dwarf campaign, which promises to be much more far-reaching than even g. Plastron's comment in my guestbook that I promised I'd get to: "I would have responded yesterday if I had anything at all to say. I don't like these types of conversations because all they tend to amount to is one group holding bias over another all the while having no particular interest in actually listening AND understanding. I will be honest and say that I do not understand the atheistic point of view. Not because it lacks passion, or because it is ill planned, but rather because I have never NOT believed. It is just beyond my scope of understanding. Where as many in the "atheist camp" have an advantage over me, they once believed and now do not. Sometimes, I wonder, is hate the only reason for disbelief?" The first part is understandable. People do tend to be hot-headed about religious issues. And the part about being unable to understand, having never not believed, also understandable. It goes both ways: some people can't understand the religious viewpoint, having never believed. Now, as for hate being the only reason for disbelief, that's interesting. Oddly, that does crop up a lot: people who say "would a merciful loving god let _______ happen? No. Therefore, I don't believe in god." I don't know why this argument is heard so often; I find the logic rather fallacious. The person does, or did at least, believe in this god and rather appears to be punishing gok by "withholding" belief. It's interesting. I don't want to say this type of person isn't a "real" atheist, because then we end up on the same footing as people who want to define who is "really" gay, who's a "real" man, what's a "real" Protestant conservative republican, and so on. But I can say, this is not the flavor of atheism that I, and what I think is the quiet majority of non-believers, can relate to. Briefly put (ha, that won't last long), there are many other reasons to lack belief, rather than simply anger/hatred. Some people were never brought up to believe; they have no reason to do so. For those of us who were raised as believers, a kind of undoing takes place. It can happen all at once ("Hm, this makes no sense. Hey, NONE of this makes any sense! I renounce you!), or by piecemeal ("I no longer have faith in this aspect...I no longer find this to be true...I question the voice of authority on this...I question all of it"). I don't like to really explain the process as it was for me, because I know that if I was perfectly honest about it, it would be offensive to a lot of people. I have no interest in being offensive, and I really don't think it should matter to any of you the way I think about religion now. We all disapprove of each other's lives plenty now; we don't need any more fodder. ;) Go on, tell me that isn't true. Lastly, a lesson in life I learned of late. Holy alliteration, Batman...this lesson pertains to sunglasses. I bought a pair of sunglasses for the cruise that was way more expensive than any pair I've ever had. As soon as I took them out of my pocket in Tampa, they crapped out. They managed to function for the rest of the trip, but their integrity was greatly undermined. Yesterday I went to put them on when I was walking home, and the one busted stem was so floppy, they wouldn't stay on my face. So I took them home and went scavenging amongst my tools for an instrument tiny and slender enough to adjust the wee screw. Fit for the job, just barely: my tweezers. I worked on that little screw for a long time. Turns out, it could not be moved with brute force; it needed to be coaxed along slowly and purposefully. ("Hello, Metaphor for Life." "Hello, Jessie.") So I coaxed the screw around bit by bit, trying to release its grasp on the floppy stem, when all of a sudden, the offending stem popped off in my hand. Of its own accord. Having nothing to do with the screw. Read: becoming broken for life. The moral of this story is, I'm never buying a pair of sunglasses that expensive ever again. The end. P.S. - the sunglasses cost thirteen dollars and sixty cents. 9:26 a.m. - 2002-05-30 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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