Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

1) Have I mentioned here, yet, that I started a Soundcloud account, so I could post my reading aloud of my poems -- right now, especially, the poems in my book The Monsters' Rhapsody: Disability, Culture & Identity? There are 30 poems in the chapbook, and so far, I've done the first two: The Monsters' Rhapsody and Anthem (For the People of No Nation). I still plan on making videos of the poems, but I also want to have them up on multiple platforms, and there's less of a mental block in making them audio only.

2) I'm just so discouraged by the Impeachment, knowing ahead of time that it's a foregone conclusion that Lord Dampnut will be acquitted because of blind party loyalty.

3) Here's a video I watched this last week, about how the word "Straight" came to mean "Heterosexual." It's nice to see the privileged center of our culture get interrogated, sometimes, too (Wuth human-edited closed captions):


4) I can't remember if I've shared this before, but I'm sharing it now, anyway, because I just had it for lunch, and it was really tasty I make this in a microwavable, moisture resistant paper bowl, so I don't have to worry about cleanup):

Smooth, "natural style" almond butter (The kind where the oil separates from the solids, if you leave sitting for very long,* thinned with egg whites (I use the pre-separated whites from a carton, because spasticity), until it's a an even thick consistency, like heavy cream, seasoned with salt, sugar and cinnamon to taste. Into this mixture, toss small, mouse-bite sized pieces of somewhat stale bread (Martin's whole wheat potato bread is my favorite kind, so far), and stir them around until there is no puddle of liquid in the bowl, and the bread bits are evenly soaked through and squishy. Zap in the microwave until the egg is fully cooked and firm (I use a 700 Watt oven, and it takes 3 minutes. If I put raisins in the mix, I'll add a bit of water, and zap the thing at 50% power for two minutes, and full power for another two minute, so the raisins can hydrate before the egg mix is fully cooked. This also works with peanut butter. But cashew butter comes out with a weird texture.

*Oh, and an easier way of dealing with oil separating out of nut butters: if you have a few days, weeks, or months before you have to open the jar, just store the jar upside down, and let the oil redistribute its own damned self.

5) I know that last week, I said I wouldn't talk any more about the Spongebob Musical for a while, but when my brain gets hold of a good story that has flaws, it tends to worry at those flaws like a tongue wiggling a loose tooth. So, here are three of them:

• After watching the musical, I got intrigued as to its origin. And that's when I learned that the creator (Stephen Hillenburg) originally wanted the show to end after 3 seasons. If Nickelodeon had allowed that to happen, instead of relying on the show to be a weight-bearing pillar of the network, then the Tina Landau and Kyle Jarrow would have had more leeway, emotionally, to go a little bit darker, and not stick so closely to the tone of a Saturday Morning cartoon, because the primary audience would be people who were kids 20 years ago, instead of people who are kids, today (that said, I think kids today can totally handle a darker emotional tone than grown-ups give them credit for. Not that the executives who oversaw each stage of the production would understand that).
  
• One of the things that bothered me about the play was that the Spongebob's main goal of the entire plot was to save his town and realize his potential as a hero. But in the script, his happy ending was getting to be manager of the restaurant; that just seemed like a big anticlimax. I've since learned that that particular plot point was a callback to the first Spongebob Movie. It's occurred to me that they could have picked up the play after the events of the movie -- with Spongebob already manager, but still frustrated, because everyone is still treating him like a little kid (because even though he has a manager's responsibilities, he still likes to blow bubbles, and eat ice cream).
  
• One of the darker emotional threads of the story that the play pulls back from is that all four of the core characters share a similar angst of not being heard -- of no one understanding that each of them bring something important to the table. That's why it really annoys me (the more I think about it) how the script has it as a running joke that Spongebob always interrupts Patrick mid-sentence. That's not "BFF" Behavior. Just Saying.

And that's five.

The other day on the radio, I listened to an interview with a speech coach. She was actually billed as a "Speech Therapist," but as the interview focused on her work helping people find more comfortable ways to use their voices, to help project their intentional self-image to the world, rather than her work correcting actual speech impediments, I think "coach" is a better fit in this context.

And in "Part 2," the interviewer invited her to rant about the "Epidemic" of up speak (or, as it's listed in Wikipedia, High rising terminal). I bet you're familiar with this? It's the vocal habit of intoning declarative sentences as if they are questions?

Now, I remember back in the late '80s or early 90s -- 25 freakin' years ago! -- when hand-wringing over "up speak" began. It was seen back then -- and reiterated by this therapist/coach the other day -- as a "bad habit" of young women, used as a way to appear less threatening, or socially appeasing, maybe, and was (is) described as a way to infantilize yourself.

Okay. Fine.

And then this woman said that something remarkable and terrible is happening: Men are starting to use it, too (Oh, noez!).

Now, here's the thing: Back-in-the-day, the "cultural explosion" of this strange new phenomenon of "up speak" was explained as being the result of all these young women leaving college and entering traditionally male business careers. And by using high rising terminal speech, they were appeasing their male employers by playing into their expectations that women were all just really little girls (Better that than be a "B--ch," right?).

And I couldn't help thinking: If those who present as White, Cisgendered, Native Anglophone, Business Elite Educated, Males (the people at the very top of the American Privilege Pyramid) are using it now, than maybe it never just about socially kowtowing to those above you in the pyramid. If those who are least likely to need social cushioning have picked it up, then maybe (*gasp*) it might have more value than we first imagined.

I posted this information a Year-and-a-Day Ago, but I tried to do something with embedding (I think), and got something wrong, so that all that showed up on my journal was nearly impossible to actually read. And somehow, I never caught it. ...I only caught it last night because Audrey commented that I probably made even fewer posts last December than I did this year, and so I went back and checked (I actually posted more).

So I'm trying again:

It all started when I got to wondering why we only seem to use "Merry" for Christmas greetings, and "Happy" for everything else. So I went to The Online Etymology Dictionary to look it up. This is what I found:

Quote:
Old English myrge "pleasing, agreeable, pleasant, sweet; pleasantly, melodiously," from Proto-Germanic *murgijaz, which probably originally meant "short-lasting," [snip]. The only exact cognate for meaning outside English was Middle Dutch mergelijc "joyful."

Connection to "pleasure" is likely via notion of "making time fly, that which makes the time seem to pass quickly" [snip, again]. There also was a verbal form in Old English, myrgan "be merry, rejoice." [and a third snip].

The word had much wider senses in Middle English, such as "pleasant-sounding" (of animal voices), "fine" (of weather), "handsome" (of dress), "pleasant-tasting" (of herbs). Merry-bout "an incident of sexual intercourse" was low slang from 1780. Merry-begot "illegitimate" (adj.), "bastard" (n.) is from 1785. Merrie England (now frequently satirical or ironic) is 14c. meri ingland, originally in a broader sense of "bountiful, prosperous." Merry Monday was a 16c. term for "the Monday before Shrove Tuesday" (Mardi Gras).
Unquote.

I think that the link to "Short time" is probably key. The fact that "Christmas Comes But Once a Year," has always been key to its celebration, I think, since it's also always been tied to the passage of time -- at least, since the days when the New Year moved to January 1. The happiness you wish someone for their birthday is the the quieter, longer lasting (and less exhausting) sort.

There's also the association with music and singing (Fa-la-la, la, la, la-la-la, LA!), and bounty... And Christmas, is, at its core, a harvest festival. (All hail the Hogfather!)

So "Merry," in its proverbial DNA, contains all those ideas lumped up together. So its stayed tied to "Christmas" even though we don't remember why.

Still working on that poetry collection* I drafted during July's Camp NaNoWriMo... And a good quarter of them, so far, are etymological-- often snagged directly from dictionary pages, rearranged for the purposes of scansion.

Right now, I'm writing a longish poem on the word "Cripple," and trying to explain why I love the word, even though it is most often used in hateful contexts. And this simile / analogy popped into my head: Etymology is to cultural beliefs what fossils are to biology. People choose words to convey their thoughts, and the meanings of those words change gradually over time as people's attitudes change. So by tracing the meaning of a word, through its different language roots, you can find evidence of what people were experiencing a thousand years ago, even if they weren't writing them down explicitly, in a "Dear Diary" format. Just like the fossils of tiktaalik tell us about how we are related to ancient, bony, fishes, words themselves can provide evidence of the people whose lives and experiences are otherwise not recorded at all


*or "short essays that just happen to be in iambic pentameter"?

It'a a combination word puzzle and a Disability Awareness Exercise, and I know folks in my circle who enjoy both, so:

[Begin Quote]
I have always believed that those, 'ride around in a chair for an hour to experience how hard it is to be a disabled person' kind of exercises are both patronising and counter-productive. You cannot take a 'tourist' approach to difference. I believe asking someone to write a paragraph without using the letter 'e' is a much better exercise. I know I've written about this before, but I want to revisit this. The whole time the pen is in hand the mind is thinking and evaluating, options - that's life with a disability.

Try it now. Translate this sentence into one that doesn't use the letter 'e':

My home is my castle where I eat and sleep.
[End Quote]

(and yes, I'm trying it -- haven't gotten there yet).

[ETA: ( This cut is hiding my solution )]

Listened to:
From WNYC's "RadioLab" -- A a segment from a show from December last. The first five and a half minutes or so of this 33 minute segment is about the joy of a man at the end of a three-month solo trek across Antarctica. And then, from then on, it's the story of a Holocaust survivor who tried to invent a new communication system that he hoped would end all war... That, it itself, would have been fascinating. I was not expecting it to end up revolving around children with cerebral palsy living in an institutional home/school/hospital in the 1970's in Ontario, Canada... but it did (Content note-- it ends on a fairly tragic, ironic note):

Mr. Bliss

For something completely different, also from "RadioLab": Liev Schreiber reads Italo Calvino's The Distance of the Moon; written in Italian in 1965, and translated into English in 1968... i.e., before we landed there...
(Content note-- one of the main characters is written as Deaf for metaphorical/symbolic reasons as a sort of Magic!wild-man/Innocent-Primitive)

Read:
Found by way of "Rolling around in my head": Reclaiming memory: Searching for Great-Aunt Sarah (Content note: institutional life and death in the early 20th century)

From "Rolling around in my head" Directly: The Better Way (content note: neither tragic nor ironic-- includes a crying baby)

Watched:
And a child shall lead them -- going-on-eleven year-old Stephanie leads a blue-grass band of adult white men... You can tell she's the leader in this particular set, because she sets the tempo for their playing, and signals the final chorus of the first song with a straight-leg kick (a standard signal in folk music):


(Content note-- precocious kid on stage and occasional out-of-focus camera).

This moved me not so much for the cuteness factor, but the aplomb and grace of one so young in front of an audience -- maybe that's her "un-cuteness"?

Just a word or two on word choices (because it's something I've been thinking about, these past few weeks, and that's what these journal thingies are for, right?):

There are those (many, most, nearly all, maybe I'm the odd one out...) who see words like "crippled" and "lame" to refer to people with physical (especially mobility-related) disabilities as unequivocally derogatory, like the N# word, or the R# word.

A year and a bit ago, when I started collecting folktales and other pre-modern literature featuring disabilities, I knew I was going to come across these two particular words a lot. And I had a decision to make: do I reproduce these words faithfully, as they appear in the original (or translations of the original)? Or should I bowlderize them, and replace the offending words with "Mobility impaired," "couldn't/can't walk," etc.

Now, as an English Major, and lover of the Humanities, I can't abide bowlderization. ...after all, the words are part of the history, and the history is part of the understanding, and understanding is crucial to finding justice.

So I made a conscious decision to keep those words in each story as I find them.

And after that, I found I was no longer offended by the words themselves, but only as they've ended up being used in the generations through which I've lived (yes, by now, I've lived through multiple generations -- I'm surprised by this, too).

Used as a simple descriptive word for human being who crawls more easily than s/he/ou walks upright, "crippled" (from the same root as "creep," and "crawl") is no more derogatory than "Wheelchair-" or "Crutch-User") --

Except this same word has been used extensively (or even mostly) to refer to things that aren't even human -- an example:

"The wide-spread power outage on the East Coast today crippled Internet trading, and the Stock Market fell seventy points."

So, then, the word, which once was used as a simple descriptor (even self-descriptor) in literature of the past, has become "Dehumanizing" because it's been used to describe every thing that's ever been broken. And people are not things, and people don't break (in the same way cars do).

So -- in light of that, I've decided to refer to myself as "crippled" and/or "lame," because, by their first meanings, that's what I am. I will, however, take a ten-mile word detour (if I have to) to avoid applying either of these words to any abstract thing (like the stock market, or Government) or inanimate object.

Does this make any sense?

So yeah... the other day, I wrote this as a quickie post:

[Quote]
A proposal for a definition of "Geek," which can exist independent of any particular cultural trend (e.g. video-games, comics, or spec. fic):

Noun:

Someone to whom the sentence: "You're over-thinking this," is inherently nonsensical.
[Unquote]

This is the ultimate antithesis of a "quickie post" It has All the Words... But a bunch are under cuts, and I'll understand if you don't actually read them all (though it would be nifty if you read some). Basically, this is where a non-geek would say I'm over-thinking this...

That thought came to me in the middle of watching the newest music video from the YouTube Channel called "Geek and Sundry," which is provided under the cuts below for those who are curious. Go Watch / Read / Whatever. I'll wait 'till you get back.

( I'm the one that's cool -- video behind the cut for NSFW or kids visuals )

( I'm the one that's cool -- Song lyrics for those who can't watch vid, behind the cut for length )

The thing is, I've always considered myself a "geek,"* but I had to Google about two-thirds the cultural references in those lyrics before I understood them. And I really think "geek" is really more about: 1) A general attitude toward the world around you and 2) your favorite ways of solving problems than it ever was about which particular cultural tastes you have.

I mean, take this soliloquy from Hamlet, for example: if these aren't the words of a Geek-type wishing he could be more of a Jock-type, than I don't what is (whether these are words strictly specific to character and situation, or [as I suspect] the author getting a wee bit autobiographical)

( Video of he Soliloquy from the end Act 2, Scene 2 in *Hamlet* as acted by David Tennant )**

( Text of the Soliloquy )

( Here's where I stop quoting and start babbling my own words about everything above -- Starting with *Hamlet* and finishing with why I think 'Geekdom' is MORE than just science, math, computers, and science fiction, but even so, I understand why so many people think Geek=Science ... What do you mean, I'm 'over-thinking this?' )


*or rather, as someone of that personality type -- the year I graduated left high school, (I stayed an extra year after I was qualified to graduate so I could be in the new Advanced Placement History and English classes): 1982, the first definition of "Geek" in the dictionary was still "Someone who bites the heads off chickens," and I was never that.

**There's also a video that compares the performances of both Simm and Tennant, back-to-back, but of the two, David's version comes across to me as more frantically barely-out-of-adolescence in age, in terms of don't-know-what-to-do-with-my-feelings and resulting social awkwardness, so I think of this performance as one of the geekiest ever. Makes it easier to remember that Shakespeare wrote the character to be college student... Or it could just be because of that tee-shirt he's wearing in the scene ;-)

On Tuesday, I posted this:

From the end of the second verse [eta: of Mystery Song]:

Reporting live from the frontline
We carry the torch for the ones who're scared to shine

The last verse:

One thing I know is for definite
Soul, body and mind, you got the same benefit
If you trust your heart, there ain't no way of losing it
Keep doing your thing, against all etiquette.
10, 9, 8, start the countdown
7, 6, 5, about to go down
4, 3, 2, 1, sing along now.


ETA #2: At first, I thought I'd just leave it there, and not burden you guys with me gushing on about a language I love but don't live in.

But thanks to trouble, I learned about a video (reported on by Huffington Post) by a couple of ignoramuses claiming to be covering a song in ASL -- but really, all they're doing is flailing their hands about in a stereotypical, audist, hateful way. And then, they're removing and blocking all comments by actual Deaf, Native ASL Signers who are calling them out on it. So I thought I'd put dedicate some of my space to real True-biz Sign Rapping, to thumb my nose at those fools.

( The Answer to the riddle I posed (With video of the whole song) is below this cut )

As my mother would have phrased it: "If I could write like that (in a third language, no less), I wouldn't talk to anybody!"

(Cross-posting; this is what I wrote in disability, last night):

It occurred to me recently that the whole use of "Crutch" as a derogatory term belies how many people assume we're all faking our disabilities: "I bet they could walk if they really tried; they're just too lazy to carry their own weight.

Compare that with Ladders as a metaphor: climbing the ladder of business success.

And really, crutches are more like ladders than they are not: both are tools to help us get higher than we're capable of, under own own power: ladders help us surmount a steep barrier, and crutches help us get our noses out of the mud. They even kind of look the same, if you think of the hand grip as a rung.

---

And here are some further thoughts I've written as replies in discussion:

(Further on the idea of ladder as something positive, even though "climbing the corporate ladder" is often used to criticize someone's brutal ambition):

Yes, in that sense, "climbing the corporate ladder" is often talked about in a negative way, but there's also often an air of admiration about it, at the same time-- of the person's energy, ambition, cleverness, and so forth. And even when someone is criticizing the climber, it's never the ladder that's seen as the negative thing, in the same way that crutches are.

(In response to the point that most people think of crutches as temporary, to be used only while an injury heals):

What bothers me is that whether or not the need for crutches is permanent or temporary doesn't matter.

Casting them in a negative light belies the bias that the crutch-user's judgement of their own abilities is not to be trusted, and the Able-bodied Authority (or even stranger) has the right (and duty) to chastise and "reeducate" them.

(The idea that just came to me, about how I can help change things):

I'm going start referring to them as "hand ladders" (like handsaw, or hand drill):

"Excuse me, could you help? My hand ladder fell over, and I can't reach it."

"Your what?"

"My crutch -- you know -- my hand ladder." And roll my eyes as if it were obvious.

It could be quite fun spreading a little linguistic chaos that way. ;-)