ForsakenDAemon.net

Various people have been complaining that I haven’t blogged in a long time, which is true. But, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t had the time, motivation or content to really blog properly, so I thought I’d save you the effort of reading something malformed and pointless.

One of the major topics that’s been occupying my mind recently is the idea of Pride. Not pride with a lowercase ‘p’ so much, more the politically charged concept that seems to be so important to so many people.

The question, really, is simple: do I have Pride?

Not pride, lowercase ‘p’, that apparently pedestrian state of being in which I am satisfied and comfortable with who I am and what I have achieved, but Pride, capital ‘P’, a vibrant, exciting, all-encompassing feeling of self-righteous joy and wonder at the awesomeness of myself.

Well, the answer is simple. Do I have that kind of Pride? Well, if you define it like that, then no, I don’t. I don’t feel like anything about myself is particularly awesome (although I don’t dislike it), particularly not my sexuality (which is where this definition of Pride seems to be applied most often).

That said, I’m not ready to disavow the term quite yet. While I may not feel the sense of “wonder and awesomeness” that I seem to see among some others professing the term, there is something that I have that connects me to these people.

Yes, we share something about who we date, who we love, and who we fuck, but that’s not it. Yes, we share a decent-sized chunk of the world who think that we are evil or disgusting, but that’s not it either. Yes, we’ve all had people turn their noses up at us or abuse us or call us names because of the precise nature of our expressions of love, but that’s not it.

I think the thing I share most with these people is community. The thing that brought us together was Who, What, When, Where and How we loved, but what keeps us together is something far more ephemeral, far less definable. Far less definite, if I’m truly honest.

What holds me to the community is the people. The wonderful, fantastic, fun, exciting, ultimately human people who are no better or worse than any other – if maybe a little more honest about it.

And in the end, I realise I do have Pride, that all-encompassing joy and self-righteous swelling of the heart. But it’s not for me, it’s not for my life or my sexuality.

It’s for my community, whoever, wherever, however they may be.

It’s rare that I’ll make a blog entry recognising my Catholic heritage. And it’s even more rare that I’ll make a blog entry under the influence of anything other than caffeine. But, let’s put that aside and see what comes out.

It’s sad to me that people can’t put aside whatever differences they have and just get on in life. That really upsets me. In the end, aren’t we all just children (creations, ideas, facets) of $DEITY (the divine, God, Gaia)? Aren’t we all just as wondrous and beautiful and fantastical as each other?

It worries me that there is so much hate in the world.

Wouldn’t it be easier if we were just nice to each other for a change? Keeping in mind that one of the last people to say that apparently got nailed to a tree…

Peace out.

DAemon

I started reading a book the other day. Various people said that I should read it, and I’d been meaning to for quite some time. One of my friends said that he cried through to the end of the book. I reached the point that he mentioned, and the five little words that I’d been trying not to think leapt into my mind, unbidden and unwanted. Around and around they go, just five little words.

“Don’t worry!” she said to me. “You’re a smart guy, you’re intelligent, you’re careful. You’ll never have to worry about that. It just won’t happen to you.” I sit in fear, because part of what she says is true. But the other part? Intelligence doesn’t stop an accident from happening, it just reduces the chances. Delays the inevitable.

“Want to come to bed?” he says to me. And I do, and I want it, and I don’t, and I see the possible future in his glinting green eyes, and I run. He’s not a bad guy, there’s nothing partiularly wrong ith him, I like him, I want him, I feel the need in me so badly that it hurts to run, but I do. I leave him lying there on the bed, and I go home, and I cry on my off-white pillow.

To disappoint my family, to be alone, to never be remembered, to hurt the people around me: these are the most terifying things for me. Never to have a family of my own, never to make it to be old, to be old and lonely and giving up, to be young and lonely and giving up, to know that I promised myself that I’d never live through that. That scares more than anything else. It doesn’t help me much.

Die alone, die in your lover’s arms, die by your own hand, die by the tiniest living thing imaginable, it doesn’t matter. From dust you came, and to dust you shall return, whether by fire or by rot. They keep telling me that I shall die, and how I shall die, and that the seed of my own death is within me, prescribes how I shall leave this world. The last wall of my defences will crumble and fall, and the enemies outside the gates shall swarm through my city and destroy my people. WIth swords and fire and free love the enemies shall come, and I shall not stop them, for my walls and knights have returned to dust.

The name of the book is Holding The Man, by Timothy Conigrave.

This post is part fiction and part realism, for the true extent of my fear does not control me, but never leaves me.

For all those whose lives have been lost: May They Rest In Peace.

In Australia (and, indeed, anywhere else really) there is a peculiar beastie, hereafter called a ‘radqueer.’

This particular subset of the queer community are distinguished by their beliefs that queers are continuously oppressed, and that only concerted effort on their part (and everybody else’s part, but we’ll get to that later) will get us through.

Let me state this for the record: I am not, nor have I ever been, a radqueer. I don’t ‘fight for my right to’ [insert something here]. The closest I think I’ve ever come to chanting a slogan is ‘I’m here, I’m queer, does that get me cheap beer?’ during one particularly drunken night at a straight bar having a rainbow-themed night, and the only placard I’ve ever held was a blood-stained piece of white card proclaiming ‘the dead are people too’ during a Zombie Shuffle several years ago.

In case you don’t get the picture – I don’t do activism. Not that kind of activism, anyway, I don’t think that it works very well, and I don’t think that it’s very smart. The things that I want out of life that I would conceivably have to protest for are coming to me, slowly but surely, by me asking for them, working for them, convincing people to work with me rather than fight me.

Relatively high on my list of priorities are things like adoption rights, legal partnership recognition, and decent anti-discrimination legislation. Relatively low on the list are things like the right to divorce the bastard once I can live comfortably off half his assets. Of the things that I find important, many of them are already well on their way in Australia, through legal reform and the action of a gradually more open-minded legislature.

Every time I bring up these desires, I am labelled a ‘tool of the patriarchy,‘ and am told that by wanting these things, I am ‘supporting the mechanism of a heteronormative machine seeking the subjugation of women and the oppression of the ‘other.’‘ If I truly wish to ‘subvert the dominant capitalism ideals of the hegemony,‘ I should give up such ideas, and instead ‘oppose the normalised xenophobia that manifests as institutionalised homophobia and misogyny.‘

I’m rapidly learning that this jumble of words and sentences means very little. Roughly translated?

“Come be a martyr with me. All the cool kids are doing it.”

I’m running late, so I’ll keep this brief for now. Today is a good day – I’m having breakfast with my mother, going to watch some children’s theatre, and I’m catching up with Jonathan and Ryan today, ’cause Ryan’s come to Melbourne for the weekend.

I’ve left the shawl and blanket that I was working on at work, so I’m moving back to a coat-thing that I started wuite a while ago for Rent that I never got finished. It’ll be great once it’s done, it’s just a matter of finishing it. After that I should probably do the yoke on the Mark sweater, I’m just a little terrified that I’m going to get it wrong or something and have to frog it all.

Work yesterday was long but good: they’re recognising that I’m overworked, and are trying to fix it! Also, we’re moving email hosts this weekend, which means lots of fun times for me on Monday as I run around like a madman trying to fix everyone’s POP settings.

Anyway, I’m heading off for breakfast, and I promise that a more thoughtful, incisive and interesting blog is just around the corner!

DAemon.

As part of my (admittedly fiendishly underpaid) work, I regularly have to redesign promotional materials for the office, including one-page advertising for inclusion in promotional packs, HTML emails, programs, flyers and brochures.

Regularly, I receive an email saying something along the lines of ‘pls redo fancy email send me text i will edit THANKS,’ signifying that several hours of perfectionist tweaking is about to ensue, followed by half an hour of trying to get the thing to print on a badly shared printer that the ‘tech guru’ of the office bought because the guy said it was good and gave him half price on toner cartridges for a year, even ‘though it’s a Solid Ink Phaser.

Then, the fun really starts. After being left on her desk for an hour and a half (just long enough for me to think that she likes it), the boss decides that she doesn’t like the copy that I’ve written that actually makes sense, doesn’t like the design that I’ve worked on for hours, and wants to know ‘why couldn’t you just make it look like the one we used to have but with the new photos and change the number to 40.’

Here is where my dilemma starts. I’ve been given someone else’s design, someone else’s work, someone else’s text, and have been asked to ‘make it look like that one.’ Now, the company owns the design, so there’s no legal issues there, and I don’t even really mind doing it so there’s not even really any ethical issues.

My issue is more one of professional pride – do I want to put my name to something that looks ugly? Do I want to spend my time recreating something that is essentially someone else’s idea, and get paid for it?

In the end, it’s a moot point. I will recreate the document, and make it look good, and tweak the things that I can’t bear to see about it so that it’s what they’ve asked for but still something that I’m not completely distraught about putting my name to. My job is to make the client happy more than to create wonderful designs, that’s just the nature of the beast.

But I don’t have to like it.