fences Q Yah, even, not "fenses" but "fences." Contrary to what Frost suggested for the countryside, where there are roaming livestock to worry about, fences do not foster neighborliness in the city, where for the most part only cats, dogs, sundry wildlife, and children under 12 roam. Unfortunate adults in the city usually confine themselves to sidewalks, parks and other public places, so private fences rarely matter to them. 021111 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Bad fences make bad rabbits. Or bad neighbours make bad rabbits. Or the rabbits were just BORN that way. It was a vivid dream. I was in my parents' backyard in the middle of summer. It was the hottest day of the year (I think it'd been the coldest so far, in Montreal, the day before). The heat hung heavy and I remembered how much I hated it. I sat under a tree, lethargic, scratching at my arm and felt a sense of foreboding. Today was the day, you see, when the Presbyterian Church of Canada would vote on whether to allow clergy to marry same-sex couples, and I felt the foreboding because I knew they wouldn't choose the right thing. Now, the right thing was obviously what I thought was the right thing, which was to make it possible but give clergy an individual choice so no one was forced to do anything. It seemed a matter of life and death on this very hot day. Then I sort of roused myself from this stupor and decided to do some exercise anyway, hot day or not. Earlier in the dream, I'd read that rabbits have flexible, powerful jaws and can bite so hard that they crush bones. So what I did was, deliberately, get up on the neighbour's fence and walk along it, leaning on the side of their house, directly underneath their angry pet rabbit. I knew I was invading its territory, but I felt like teasing it. Then, of course, it leaped up and sunk its teeth into my jaw. I remember thinking that it hurt but not as much as I'd expected it to, and I had to get it off or it'd crush my bones... and then I woke up in a fright. Even though it was a pretty silly fear-dream. 150228 ... e_o_i Why was it so hard to say what was bothering me? The dream was on Tuesday morning. I know the reason I dreamed the rabbit-biting part: I was nervous about having blood extracted that day, not so much the needle part but the feeling dizzy part. This was for an experiment, not a medical test or a blood donation, but the nurse was very nice. I got to lie down, so I didn't even feel light-headed, just a bit weak, like I'd had just that much energy drained out. The experiment is something about how genes correlate with memory. I have to go in again the week after next, this time for a test in an MRI machine. During the first session, after taking the blood, they had me lie down in an MRI machine just to make sure it wouldn't freak me out. Are people in general really more afraid of putting their heads inside an easily-escapable cylinder than having blood drained from their bodies? I dunno. Anyway, I'm not worried about that part; I'm looking forward to the memory test and the money at the end. Why is it so hard to say what's bothering me? Wednesday was the problem. Mom (who also doesn't work "normal" hours - God, I hate that word right now) was volunteering with me at feeding_the_poor_with_dandelion_leaves (or soup) and I heard her complaining to the just-turned-90 woman who helps serve almost every week about Ontario's new sex-ed program. See, they're teaching kids about homosexuAlity as if it's NORmal! I got angry and stuck my head in the kitchen, though I was supposed to be setting up the tables, and snapped, "Yeah, it's NORmal!" plus a roll of my eyes, very teenage-like. (Dunno what L. thought of either of us.) Usually angry-me isn't very rational, but I think that reaction at least was justified. I let her have it when we were at home, though. We were sitting around the table and I burst out with that grievance and others, saying something to the effect of, "You can think a thing is wrong if you like, but don't say it's not normal. If 5% of people in the world are some sort of gay, it's not the majority, but it's a pretty well established biological FACT and you can't go around calling stuff not normal." Oh, fair enough. But I got worse. I said there was something "fundamental" in her that was a problem, and I didn't mean religion, I meant the viewpoint that she'd "always" had where if I wasn't normal I was bad. I reminded her when she'd gotten distressed at me hitting my forehead with annoyance and had told me to stop being "autistic" (pretty sure she only said that once - but I wasn't being fair at this point). I told her she probably thought my brother and I were failures, because we both had learning disabilities of a sort, and she was making me in particular feel bad. She was making me feel bad for not being BORN just heterosexual and she was making me feel bad in GENERAL. And I didn't want her to say things that could very well hurt OTHER people, which was a distinct possibility. Then I retreated to the kitchen. (Their kitchen, not the soup kitchen kitchen - in case I didn't properly indicate the scene change. It's better to have domestic arguments in domestic spaces. Then you can stare at the floor dramatically without worrying about other people finding you strange.) There was silence for a while. Dad was at the table now, and Mom called me back. I didn't want to cross the threshold. "I feel uncomfortable," I announced, as if this were a reason for anything, but they wanted me to return to the table while Mom said something. I compromised by remaining standing. Well. She didn't say I was sick, perverted, or irrelevant (in fact, I am healthy, perverted, and irrelevant). She was saying how that, growing up, her mother had made HER feel bad by calling her stupid. Not all the time, mind you, but the message was clearly conveyed that she was "stupid" and "slow" in school. (In college, she'd gotten good marks and she went on to do two university degrees, but those kind of slights stick with you.) She said I was right, partly, in saying that she was too worried about being normal and wanting her children to be normal. I was kind of taken aback. I'd expected to make a righteous argument against a cliché, and here was a person instead. I said some things about her being smart and me being sorry. But no one is consistently smart or consistently sorry, and it made me burst out into semi-hysterical laughter when she said, in complete honesty, "But I don't want you to be bisexual." Me: "Didn't we go over this like eleven years ago?" (Note my diction slipping back in time, too. Like eleven years ago, indeed.) Then Dad interjected some more abstract arguments, to the effect that each generation had its drawbacks and if "this" generation's fault was its anything-goes postmodernism, "his" generation had made some bad assumptions, but you see, I needed to understand that the church (dunno if it was the Presbyterian Church in Canada specifically, or exactly WHAT their connection is to killer rabbits) had it tough when the only sexual morality had to do with consent and capability of consent. I was shaking my head. "That's not true. People generally agree that cheating in a relationship isn't good. There's a morality right there." More things were said, serious and silly. At one point my mom asked me what I was saying - was it that I wanted to be a man? No, I said, clearly I'm cisgender - and she looked at me in alarm, as if to say, "What's that now? Is there another weird gender thing that I have to know???" and so I explained, feeling superior. But that feeling was stupid, since I'd only learned the word two years ago. I don't even think it existed more than ten years ago. It's a word that makes sense, as the opposite of transgender, and I think it's fair and useful - but at the same time there's a snobby academic sound to it. Word knowledge is another kind of "privilege" in the sociology sense of that word. It's not a more immovable thing like (so-called) race, but it's an in-group marker. You feel left out if you can't join in on the authoritative discourse, but then again... ...you don't bring "intertextuality" to a pillow fight. Okay, people are human (I_have_words, lots) but it discourages me sometimes what people really think (in the 21st_century). It discourages me that it took crude verbal attacks to get insight into someone's past. Nothing is "fundamentally" wrong with anyone, and what's abnormal with me isn't all wrong, but I should be less self-centred and more understanding. Less angry-angsty. But, by infinity, why's my life acting as if it's sixteen instead of twenty-six? It makes me want to cry! ... This had almost nothing to do with fences. 150301 ... gja the plural of those that facilitate theft 150303 what's it to you? who go blather from