So I wrote my first article for Scarleteen! It’s a first-person “in your own words” piece about getting out of a relationship when you know it’s time. Read it!
Here: http://www.scarleteen.com/article/words/when_the_time_comes
Category Archives: Personal story
In Significance.
I did something significant yesterday. Well the thing is, it really seems very INsignificant. And I suppose in the grand scheme of things, it of course IS insignificant. But shush, I’m being all deep.
So throughout my life, I have events — even just tiny little random memories — that are tied to objects for me. Obviously this isn’t just the case for me, I’m assuming you all can relate here. So you know that as life goes on, more and more objects have memories tied to them. That toy cat that my friend gave to me as a thank-you gift after I attempted to teach them guitar. That CD that I listened to while playing with that toy, with my childhood friend who moved away years ago. More emotionally significant memories, like that love letter my first love wrote to me, or that art set I received from my grandfather who has now passed away. It’s not just objects, either — that bay where my best friend and I kayaked and lay in the sun-warmed water for hours. That forest where my friends and I would hike every weekend.
As life goes on, more and more things have a person tied to them by memory. Less and less things are meaningless, less things exist in my life that don’t remind me of someone, sometime. This is, of course, not a bad thing. I cherish memories of my friends and family and past loves, even if they’re painful at certain points in life. But I also cherish the things I have that are not tied to anyone. The things that exist in a sort of vacuum, that don’t make me think of anyone at all. Things that will never be painful for me to find tucked in the bottom of the drawer, because they will never be tied to anyone who I loved or lost. They’re things in my life that are completely and utterly my own.
So when I willingly and knowingly give up one of those things, allow them to be taken out of that emotional vacuum, it is a significant act because of what it symbolizes. And despite it being such a tiny, trivial thing in the long run, it makes me feel strangely vulnerable. Willingly allowing my vacuum-sealed, memory-free, untouched-by-time item to become linked to someone. To give it the potential to bring back painful memories in the future, or to make me feel nostalgic and oh-so-different, my-how-things-have-changed. To share with something else even a tiny little thing that was for so long completely, entirely my own. I guess it displays my trust in that person, my faith that whatever memories become linked to that item will be worth it. That they are such a significant person to me that even a memory that might be painful someday is still a memory I will cherish.
No, there wasn’t really any specific point to this post. I was just making use of my blog to spew my random thoughts :D I just find things in life like this to be very interesting. Do you have any objects or places that you cherish specifically because they are not linked to anyone at all? Do you cherish them because they represent a part of yourself and your life that will always be entirely yours?
I’m Studying Sticking Pencils Up My Nose.
“Music is EASY”. Music is a SOFT course, you don’t have to WORK, you just sit around doing what you already enjoy and already spend time doing. You don’t know hard work until you try engineering or chemistry. This is what I hear all the time.
Go read about “The Picasso Principle”.
Do you want to attempt to do what I do? No I mean like, really — here, take my saxophone. Look, I’ve even supplied the ideal mouthpiece and reed to get the perfect jazz tone out of it. That’s already work done for you. That alone took years of trying out different reed types and thicknesses, different mouthpiece materials, different opening sizes, different barrel types. Not that you know what any of that means. But I digress. Now put it in your face and play. Oh, wait, you can’t? You don’t know how? You’ve never played the saxophone except maybe in elementary school music class? Maybe even high school, okay, well then you’re already a pro right there aren’t you. Oh wait, except you’re not.
Because it takes time. Oh lord, how much time it takes. My point is not “haha, you can’t play an instrument”. My point is that I had to start where you are and then take so, so much time and so, so much hard work to get where I am right now — able to play my saxophone competently. It is a professional who makes their art look easy, like it comes so naturally. Well, it DOES come naturally. After years. Decades. And we’re forever working. FOREVER working to improve, because we’re never as good as we could be. We can always get better.
You want to pay me shit all to play at your crappy little business venue? You want to tell me that music is easy, I don’t work hard doing a degree in music? Well obviously I don’t, I mean look at how good my marks are! It couldn’t possibly be that it’s taken years of hard work to become good enough for something to be easy.
If you spent as many hours a day, for as many years of your life, focusing on practising lots of exercises with mathematical equations and formulas as musicians spend practising their instruments, you would find university calculus just as easy and natural as musicians find playing music. If you spent as many hours a day, for as many years of your life, reading that biology textbook and memorizing those terms and how those proteins relate to that one, you would ace your bio exam as easily as musicians ace performances.
Don’t even tell me about how many bajillion hours you spent studying for that bio exam this year. I have played my saxophone for EIGHT YEARS. I practised for AT LEAST two hours every single day for four years. And that’s not as much as most people, the actually-dedicated musicians. You just feel like you do so much more studying because you’ve crammed it all into these past however-many-years of university, the first time you’ve really focused on the subject to the same extent that musicians focus on music throughout their lives.
I don’t practise as much as I used to, admittedly. So my number of hours spent practising my sax this year is probably around the same level of the hours you spent studying for those tests and exams or working on your calculus homework all year. But hey, guess what? I didn’t ace my music classes, and I didn’t find them easy as pie. We’re in the same boat when we spend the same amount of time on things. Why is that?
Music is HARD. That’s why.
And you are exactly the reason feminism exists…
apparently this fairly famous satirical list of “sexual assault prevention tips” is “by far the most sexist thing I’ve read tonight” according to someone on a facebook friend’s link to the aforementioned article.
Why?
” I’m just tired of feminist bullshit that assumes that because i’m a man, i’m going to rape peoples. It’s just annoying”
Which is fucking rich, considering it’s coming out of the mouth (well… fingers…?) of someone who sexually assaulted me and several of my friends.
Dear sir. You are the very reason the people you hate exist. I like to think that with every ignorant, bigoted, privilege-dripping sentence people like you spew, another feminist is born. Keep up the good work.
All About Me
Oh gosh, an intro!
As I’m sure you’re aware by now, since you’ve found your way to this blog, there are as many definitions of feminism as there are feminists in the world. The feminist movement has had issues with privilege and exclusion of certain groups throughout its history, each wave has had its own focus (and its own flaws), and everyone within the waves has had their own personal priority list. It depends on each feminist what it is that their personal feminism focuses upon. This is mine.
Feminism means:
- Fighting sexism
- Fighting cissexism
- Fighting heterosexism
- Fighting racism
- Fighting ableism
- Fighting ageism
- Fighting classism
- Being pro-choice
- Being sex-positive (including supporting sex workers of all kinds)
…and ACTIVELY TRYING TO ACT IN AWARENESS OF AND IN SUPPORT OF THESE ISSUES 24/7.
That’s the kicker, really.
More about me…
I am also a socialist, though my focus is on my feminism so I have not read too much around all the different types of socialism. I guess I’d be categorized as revolutionary-socialist, and more equal-opportunity oriented… but as for the other sub-sub-sub-forms and whatnot… no clue. So I’m rather informally socialist, really.
I am currently a student at a university here in Ontario, Canada, in my third year of music performance. I play the baritone saxophone primarily (although I also play the alto sax, guitar, and tin whistle just for the FUN OF IT, CHYEAH). Despite being in an “artsy” program, the atmosphere of my peers in my department is still depressingly anti-feminist.
I am a cisgender, middle-class, neurotypical white woman with no physical disabilities*… so although I am in the marginalized group in terms of gender, I’m aware that I have been born into many other privileges, and thus I try to be incredibly careful around these issues.
I am also queer – I tend to identify my sexuality as “fluid” although I don’t mind being referred to as bisexual or pansexual. My sexuality has always been able to be put on the backburner for me, first because I considered myself heterosexual for the first several years of my sexual life and thus I was granted the privilege of being left completely alone about my sexuality… then when I came out as bi/pansexual, I had the great privilege of being a part of a generally very accepting family and community, and so even then my sexuality has never been a big issue.
I was also raised in a way that meant I was just never too concerned about exactly what to label my sexuality as. Unfortunately, outside of my support circle (and sadly within it every once in a while) I am still presented with heteronormativity/bi-invisibility, everyone assuming that I’m straight, and it’s especially offensive when they assume the attitude of me being “One of Us”. So probably expect to see some ranty blog posts on such topics.
I am also a peer sex educator, having volunteered with the ever-amazing Scarleteen for about a year and spreading the knowledge I gained from that to my peers in my social circle. Sex, relationships, gender, and sexuality is a major focus of mine… I’m forever fascinated by the complexity of human sexuality. So you may notice a lot of tangential stuff around that in the future of this blog…
Now I promise that’s it from me for now. How about you?
*Is there a better word than this that I could use instead? I always try to be on the lookout for more positive words for marginalized groups, but I don’t know of any for the word “disability”.
