Les said, the better II

Last night, I went on BART, my favorite subway system, carrying on my person: A tuba, a backpack and a powered monitor speaker. In the backpack, there was a laptop, a mixing board, several power adaptors, a power splitter, a microphone and many cables. Each of these things alone could be characterized as “heavy.” I think I should invest in a wheeled contraption on which some of these things could rest, rather than carrying all of them.

So I set up my computer thingee and sound checked it and it sounded ok, if a little weird. It’s the patch I wrote for the Garden of Memory concert and I haven’t played it since. I only had one speaker (thank god), so I was playing mono. It would be fast enough to re-figure out. So we started playing and I was not getting any kind of consistent sound, mostly static. I looked at my mic input level and it was way down and then it was peaking, all over the place. So I was trying to troubleshoot while playing, which is always um.. special. I think either my mixingboard, mic cable or microphone is broken, or perhaps a bad cable. I dunno. I picked up my tuba and started playing that instead. Thank goodness for doubling.
It was alright. I like playing duets with wind instruments because it’s easier to keep track of and I’ve got a lot of vocabulary in common. I was playing with three other very talented musicians on double bass, saxophone and guitar. It was much more complicated and our vocabularies were all different. (Also, the guitar player was getting awesome electronic-y sounds and I was NOT! curses!) I dunno what people thought. I took off before the end so I could study for my French exam. For some reason, I had very little problem managing my belongings coming into the city, but on the way back, it was difficult to keep my backpack on my shoulders and too keep the speaker balanced on top of it.
And so I made sure to get enough sleep and this morning I awoke, ate breakfast, took vitamins and studied. For the first time in a while, everything seemed to be logical and fit in place. Woot. Then I biked to school and sat down to take the test.
And could not remember a damn thing.
I haven’t failed a class since 8th grade (I failed music and computers, for those of you who are curious). Failure, as they say, is not an option. If I fail a class, then I don’t get into a good college. If I fail a class, then I don’t get my degree. Hell, if I drop a class, I don’t graduate on time and end up paying a lot of extra money cuz school is expensive. So I don’t drop and I don’t fail.
I took a calculus class in junior college that I got a wholly undeserved B in. This is really my only hope for French class. I made sure to say in my godawful essay that I would speak great French once I’ve been in France for a little while and that why I took the class. If I got any of the tenses right (which I did not), it may even have been comprehensible. Have pity on me!
On the other hand, if I do fail the class, maybe I’ll go on to have some sort of exciting french-language career, like with the last classes I failed.
Playing a gig the night before the final wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but I don’t think it actually made very much difference. I dunno. I got paid less than my bart faire. If I ever win the lottery, I think I’ll just play gigs until the money runs out.
I got called sir at least twice last night. My new blue stripey shirt is magic. When I put it on, I become male. Either that or anybody with so much stuff strapped to their person must be a man.
Tag: Celesteh

this is too good to wait to post
In 1910, “life” did not begin at egg fertilization for the catholic church. “Neither does [conception] concern the passive conception absolutely and simply (conceptio seminis carnis, inchoata), which, according to the order of nature, precedes the infusion of the rational soul. The person is truly conceived when the soul is created and infused into the body. ” And when does the soul get infused to the body? “at the first moment of [the fetus’] animation.” Um, right, so when did it become a universal truth that birth control drugs were killing a soul? So when do you start to feel the fetus moving around? Not during the first trimester, right?

there’s a word in politics for an institution changing it’s mind like this and then pretending it’s had that same belief forever. that word is “flip-flop.”
Tags: Catholic, Abortion, Immaculate Conception, Celesteh

Hillary Swank passes cuz she’s playing a young guy. Also, too bad I didn’t have Dr Dobson around in my youth to set me straight.
Ack. at least he focusses most on biological males. for two reasons: 1. tomboys are not as transgressive. 2. girls don’t matter anyway.
also, the way to make your boys straight is for mothers to defer to fathers all the damn time.
Apparently, if my (hypothetical future) kids call me “dad” it will make them queer. muahahahaha
Tag: Celesteh

Edit: 10 August 2005 20:29 PST: and the least convincing denial in the history of the blogosphere goes offline. I need a shrink.

I’ve been “groovy” on the web for around 10 years now (my how time flies). I thought I would be an early-re-adopter of the term, but it never really re-attained the popularity it once had. Plus, now it is so 1995. I mentioned the change to some folks at school and they heard the old name and fell over laughing. “What did you rename it to? ‘Gnarly Place’?”

Ok, maybe the new name is equally stupid. I’d have a name-that-blog contest, but I don’t care what you think.
My real website will shortly be re-christened as well, but the process is more complicated as it involves changing graphics, which means doing more than typing something in a little box at blogger. And I have this final exam thing to worry about.
There’s an official question and answer post coming up soon covering moving to france, xena’s fate and the uses of devoir. Submit your questions for inclusion!
Tag: Celesteh

If you have an BA/BS degree, you need an 80% to get a pass at UC Berkeley. I am going to fail my french class. It is too late to drop. I cannot switch to a letter grade neither.

This knowledge is not encouraging my studies. Quite the opposite. Maybe if I studied like a madman . . . but I’d rather take a nap.
this is fucking great for applying for phd there. maybe it means i’m not cut out for it.
Tag: Celesteh

I am annoyed that I’m still asking the same questions I was asking when I was 12 and 17 years later, I still don’t have answers. Isn’t my saturn return supposed to be done by now? I was searching my blog archives yesterday for “gender binary” to find a quote by Cixous and damn if I don’t have hundreds of posts about it. “I’m fine with my body.” “I don’t know if I’m fine with my body.” “No, I really mean it, I’m fine.” “Well, I dunno.” “Fine! I’m fine!” “I’m really fine this time.” “I’m finally fine.” “Of course, things are great, fine, really.” yeah, periods of unsureness followed by protesting too much?

[TMI warning Skip to next paragraph] Friday night I was looking on the internets and pictures of naked men and damn are they’re kind of weird looking. Of course, they were models and I also think women models are kind of weird looking.
If I do the academic route, I’ll be 30 when I start PhD program, probably 35(?) when I finish, probably at least 40 when I get tenure, if I get tenure. My attempts to talk Cola into bearing my young have been for naught so far. So let’s say I go and have kids. I can either do it after coursework and god knows if I finish my thesis or I can do it during a sabbatical when I’m supposed to be publishing or something or I can wait until I’m too old. Or I can adopt, also when I’m kind of old.
And if I’m still having gender issues and have become reasonably convinced I’m not going to look like a “straight college guys” pron model, um, I can start tweaking my hormones, take a break from that, have a kid and go back to tweaking? Wait until I have a kid and then start tweaking while it’s still young? It’s so hard to figure out how to be a dad in a postmodernist society… ha ha ha.
tomorrow i’ll change my mind again. “i’m fine.” meanwhile, this biological clock ticking thing is a patriarchal lie designed to oppress women by creating a false dilemma where they are forced to chose between career goals and the supposedly “innate” desire to reproduce. Just ask me 10 years ago.
I think I might go to a support group for cross-dressers for one meeting before I’m off to europe. oh my god, i’m so weird.
Tag: Celesteh

When does your French class end? Friday

When do you go to Paris? Sept 15
Where will you live in Paris? Dunno yet
Can we hang out? Yes, between friday and sept 15
Tag: Celesteh

Several months ago, I read Cixous and started posting about binary oppositions. Binary oppositions are bad because they’re inherently hierarchical. The use of hierarchies on one context reinforces the use of hierarchies in other contexts according to Cixous. Or, as she writes, “Is the fact that Logocentrism subjects throughout – all concepts, codes and values – to a binary systems, related to “the” couple, man/woman?” (From “Sorties” in The Newly Born Woman, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Trans Betsy Wang. Exerpted in The Hélène Cixous Reader, New York: Routledge. Ed. Susan Sellers p 38 – 40) In other words, when things are placed in binary opposition, the gender binary is reinforced. The gender binary as such is closely related to other hierarchies. When you think in terms of binary oppositions, you reinforce hierarchical systems, sexism, racism etc. So we attack the gender binary by attacking the logical system behind it.

But then she goes on about how writing is women’s. Doesn’t the use of categories reinforce the binary?

Categorization is, of course, socially constructed. There are, for example, animals in the world that have hair and nurse their young. There are other animals in the world who have feathers, beaks and lay eggs. We call the former group “mammals” and the latter group “birds.” Categorizing animals in this way is useful to us because we can generalize about the categories that we have created. We can use our constructed categories to talk about things that birds tend to have in common with each other. However, it’s important to remember that these are constructed. It causes us confusion that the duck bill platypus has a bill, hair, lays eggs and nurses it’s young. It causes the platypus no angst whatsoever.

The reality of the physical, of our bodies, may place us within a category, but it doesn’t make the category anything other than constructed. God created birds and mammals, but god did not create the category “birds” nor the category “mammals.” Creation is more complicated than our categories and a fair number of beings inhabit liminal spaces between our neatly defined boxes.

Most things in nature are chaotic. They tend to fall near poles, but can also fall in between. We have our categories “male” and “female” and most people’s bodies seem to fall near these poles. But around 4% of people’s do not. Moreover, gender and sex are not equivalent. Again, we have poles regarding social roles, the largest being “heterosexual male” and “heterosexual female” but there are poles in other places and some percentage of people who fall nowhere near any of them. We all vary from ideals. We all, in some way, inhabit liminal spaces, some of us more than others.

Biology is not destiny. If the very concepts of “woman” and “man” are socially constructed, then the binary opposition is also socially constructed. Women and men are not opposites and not even a reflection of genetics or genitals. Unless you are taking an androgen blocker, the hormone that you have in the largest quantity in your body is testosterone, a hormone which also, before birth, dictates what shapes our genitals will take. We’re all just people with different hormone levels and histories. We have the power to construct our own bodies and our own categories.

The categories “mammal” and “bird” are useful for doing scientific research. The categories “male” and “female” are useful for creating new humans. Another use of categories of people is, as Cixous hints at, the creation of the “alien other.” A certain kind of man is the standard, everyone else is part of an out group. The out-groups then organize for their own interests, but this action supports the initial division, created by the in-group to cement a power system benefitting itself.

So why not attack the binary by attacking the binary?

Tags: Cixous, Gender, Liminal, Celesteh