Subject line says it all!  I’m psyched!

Brief note to the nice NPR lady who said “Gays and lesbians across the nation are celebrating”:

I’m bi, and I’m celebrating too!  (Go invisible-er minority, go!)
In fact, so is my straight boyfriend!

We should ALL be happy that equality is truly being served today.

When I was 12 years old I was in love with John Lennon.

Can’t say I didn’t have my reasons.

Men Who Explain Things

Excellent op-ed in the LA times about gender, authority, and confidence.

A week or so ago, my boyfriend/bandmate/best friend and I went to meet with a guy who will be recording his album.   For the record, a very nice guy who obviously knows sound and is going to do a great job.

Andrew’s band consists of him (obviously), me (bass/vocals), our friend ChAka on keys, and this awesome girl named Courtney who plays the drums.   The biggest thing we were discussing that day was drums, so Andrew said a lot of sentences like this: “My drummer Courtney __________”, “She will probably want to record with the bass player there,” “I’m not sure if she has ever played on an electric drum kit…”

Our recording friend couldn’t get it through his head that Courtney was a female.  Andrew continuously referred to her with a litany of female pronouns,  and the guy would throw the same sentences and ideas right back at Andrew as if he had never said “she” and they were both talking about a guy.  “Your drummer, does he play with ___?” “He’ll want to ____” etc.

Kind of harmless and amusing, and again, the guy seems like a real good guy.  It was a funny story for Courtney the next time we had practice.

Still, this shows two things:
1.  Certain men have a complete inability  to conceive of females in  what they view as  Male roles, to the point where they actually are unable to process information that is repeatedly given to them.

2.  Certain men are so sure of themselves that they will doggedly pursue their own line of thought even when it’s painfully clear to everyone else in the room that they don’t have all the facts.

I think this is totally a gendered thing.  I think men are brought up to act confident whether or not they’re actually sure of themselves, and women are brought up to be willing to hear others’ points of view, even when we already know we’re right.  I further think that it’s so ingrained in male culture that they’re not even really aware it’s happening (someone needs to write The Masculine Mystique, like whoa).

The lady who wrote the op-ed discusses this all in a much more eloquent fashion than I have here.  Read it.

Today is the national Day of Silence, aimed at ending harrassment of LGBT youth. I seem to always have a gig on the Day of Silence, which kind of precludes silence, but I’m happy to switch over to Not Silent and get the word out instead.

FYI: “4 out of 5 LGBT students report verbal, sexual or physical harassment at school and more than 30% report missing at least a day of school in the past month out of fear for their personal safety. ” This year’s day of silence is in memory of Lawrence King, a 15-year old boy who was shot and killed IN CLASS, by a fellow classmate, because of his sexuality and gender expression.

None of this is OK. Hiding behind religion, fear, or mainstream homophobia is not OK. I could give a crap what your personal beliefs are: if you think God doesn’t like it when same sex people sleep together, then don’t do it yourself. If your God doesn’t like that, then He EXTRA SUPER would not like you passing your highfalutin’ judgment on others, or harassing, assaulting, or killing people because of who they are.

More info about the day of silence here. Educate yourself.

So a few months ago I managed to step on my own glasses and break them in half (don’t ask). At the time, it warranted a brief panic followed by a midnight trip to Pathmark for some krazy glue. Which worked like a charm.

This morning, they fell off my dresser and promptly broke again. This time, the krazy glue didn’t work.

So I spent the day at Pearle Vision spending a whopping $505.97 on new glasses. (To be fair, I got a pair of prescription sunglasses with this, but that is actually NOT included in the price because the wonderful sales woman found a way to give me 50% off the order.)

FYI, my glasses did not cost so much because I just had to have the designer-est, brand-iest frames. They cost so much because my eyes are so incredibly bad that they have to do some magical thin-the-glass process, just to make the lenses be able to fit in the frames.

$500 for glasses.

I am a woman who won’t spend more than $10 on a pair of jeans. No matter what. Ever.

Further, because they have to take the time to do this magical thinny process, I have to wait a week to ten days to actually get my new glasses. So I’m sitting here with my old glasses taped together and drooping off my face periodically. It makes it pretty hard to judge distances of things, actually.

Like YAYYY.

So, if anyone feels like seeing me stumble around in public with tapey glasses, I’ve got two shows this weekend — Friday night at Vox Pop (1022 Cortelyou Road in Brooklyn) starting at 8, and Saturday night at the Pisces (14A Railroad Avenue, Babylon — I go on last).

Note: approximately 45 seconds after this picture was taken, my glasses fell off my face again.

Because I’ve been busy.

I have a love/hate relationship with being busy all the time.  There’s a validation in busy-ness.  There’s also stress, and not getting important stuff done, and not getting to focus on important things that really demand more time than you have to offer.

I’m 23 and I want to have fun and have good conversations and moving experiences and crazy random stuff happen to me.  And I guess, I do have that stuff.  And it’s hard to enjoy it in the moment because in the back of my mind I always feel stressed about something else I’m not doing.

I played a show tonight in Jersey and I kind of felt like I was phoning it in.  I played good, I had a pretty good time…  but my heart wasn’t in it the way it has been for every other gig I’ve ever had, ever.  And it’s not because I’m not still in love with music; it’s because I couldn’t get outside of the stress of I-should-have-done-a-better-job-promoting-this-are-my-friends-bored-watching-me-do-suburban-coffeeshop-people-give-a-crap-about-music-like-mine-and-is-it-really-the-best-way-to-move-my-career-forward-anymore…

Feeling bad about yourself is the quickest route to not enjoying the things you love, and the quickest route also to mediocre-izing a performance.  I made a lot of resolutions this year about getting stuff done and I’ve been pretty serious about keeping them.  At the same time, I feel like something needs to change, still, because I feel totally overwhelmed by the amount of work I need to put in to keep it all up, and on a different side of things, totally freaked out about money and making a living.  I’ve been working for myself for a while now, and I love the freedom and mental health benefits, and have no trouble disciplining myself to work — but not knowing when and how my next “paycheck” will come is putting me in constant stress.

I have all these shows coming up and I’m afraid none of them will go where I want them to go because I don’t have the time to promote them properly, and I’m still not even sure what “promote them properly” even means.  I read constantly about marketing and stuff now, and try to pay very close attention to what works and what doesn’t…  and I still feel very hit or miss about it.  Maybe it’s because I never really have time to put all the work in that I really should be putting in, on promotion.

I don’t know.  It’s easy to get down on myself about it.  It’s also not that hard to see that I have a busy life, I work at least 50-60 hours a week between “work work” and music (I’ve counted) and I’m doing my best.  And neither of those things matter that much–whether I choose to give myself a break, or to be hard on myself, the bottom line is that I’m not going to be happy until I see myself moving forward at a faster pace.

I don’t know what to do about all this.

I’m just letting it spill out of my head right now.  Hopefully tomorrow I can just spend working, working, and working and feel like I’ve made some progress on all fronts.

I have plenty of stuff to write about.

New band.  New shows.  New political diatribes (do they ever stop?).  But tonight, I just have a poem.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have nothing but respect for the gals over at Feministing for having the wherewithal to respond intelligently to Charlotte Allen’s pile of bulls*** Washington Post article. I personally just don’t have it in me. In fact, I went to great lengths to avoid reading it, because I knew from the responses it was getting that it would just make me very upset, and honestly, there’s only so much impotent rage a girl can manage in one week.

But there were so many links being flung at me within my social sphere that, in a moment of weakness, I clicked on one. And I’ll tell ya what: I am NOT linking to it here, much as I’m sure some of you may want to read it. The huge-and-growing number of link-backs to this article is telling the Washington Post “The more articles you publish like this, the more link-backs to your paper there will be.” I will, however, link to its rebuttal: A Dumb Argument

Anyway, like I said: I couldn’t respond to this article directly without getting upset, so here’s my extremely indirect response:

rorie’s Top Ten Reasons to Be A Feminist

1. Women and men are equal and should be treated as such.

2 - 10. Duh.

…Came tonight from 10:30 - 11 pm, on “Linda Live,” which is a show on JCT Magazine’s online radio station.

Didn’t you hear I was going to be on the air tonight? That’s okay, neither did I. I replied to a craigslist ad some time ago — and the fact of the matter is, I reply to many a craigslist ad in my day-to-day life — and got a response back tonight in the form of a phone call asking me if I would like to talk about Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama on the air. In an hour.

…Okay! So we had a brief conversation, Linda told me she’d call me back at 10:25, and I proceeded to freak out a little, email and text message some folks, and bury myself in Wikipedia in attempts to procure some Instant Smartness.

Then we talked for a while about Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, and the race. We’re both Obama fans, but I don’t think our political views are terribly similar otherwise, so by no means was it a “two ladies get together and say nice things about Obama” kind of talk. She had much to say about her perception of how Hilary is running her race, and I had a lot to say about my perception of how everyone else is running Hilary and Barack’s race.

I am not going to try to paraphrase her opinions here, because I don’t totally agree with them and I don’t want to run the risk of misrepresenting them due to my bias. But you can check her out weeknights at 10:30 on Linda Live on JCT 92.G radio, and get a full dose of her views. And possibly mine again too — we mutually enjoyed talking to each other and she’s said she’d like to have me back sometime. I’ll keep you posted.

Here are my opinions on the campaign.

I feel that both candidates have had little opportunity to talk policy and issues, because people are very gung-ho to focus on Hilary as a woman (instead of as a candidate) and Barack as a black man (instead of as a candidate). I feel that almost every conversation I’ve had with someone about who-to-support-for-2008 has had the words “but is America ready for a woman president?” and/or “but is America ready for a black president?”

I feel that Hilary’s opposition has been extremely sexist and has chosen to focus on obviously gender-riffic questions like “Is Hilary too emotional to run the country/her campaign/her life? Is she Turning on the Tears to make us feel bad and give her what she wants? Is Hilary going to get PMS and make a destructive national decision?” These are the sort of utterly disrespectful, unrealistic, and stereotype-based questions that are thrown at EVERY woman up for ANY position of power, and I’m just sick of them and I want badly for us to get beyond that as a country. Nobody asks if a male candidate is going to get an attack of the Testosterone Angries and nuke somebody when there’s no reason to. Nobody asks if Barack Obama is going to mess up an important national decision based on an international diplomat tempting him with fried chicken. Why? Because these things would be offensive and stupid. They are equally offensive and stupid when aimed at a woman.

On the same token, I feel that a lot of opposition to Obama is fueled by racism. No matter who is circulating pictures of him in traditional international garb and calling him a terrorist*, its intent is pointed and clear. And disgusting.

In the meantime, though, can WE (you know, the intelligent people who know that Hilary is NOT going to make PMS-based decisions and Obama is NOT a terrorist?) get over looking at them as a Woman and a Black Man, and look at them as presidential candidates? I am dying to hear some policy, and I bet they’re dying to talk about it. If I were a voter who knew nothing about either candidate and was trying to make an informed choice, I would find it very difficult to find some actual legitimate information to make my choice on. Worrying aloud whether the country is ready for a black-or-female president is exacerbating the already all-too-present problems of sexism and racism in this country. If YOU are smart enough to vote for a black candidate, or a female candidate, based on policy and not their skin color or sex — I know I am — then for heaven’s sake, can you try to intelligently explain YOUR reasons for voting for whomever, instead of letting sexism and racism win by suggesting America is “not ready” to make that same distinction? I don’t disagree that prejudice is going to play a role in this election — but I would think that the NOT prejudiced people in this country could make an effort to minimize that role by focusing on real issues, instead of maximizing it by giving it constant airplay.

And that’s… that. I would absolutely love to hear everyone else’s thoughts on this.

*By the way, though, Hilary has said it wasn’t her and she would fire the person who did it if she found out it did come from her campaign. And Barack was willing to accept that, and declared where it came from a non-issue in the most recent debate. THEY’RE not fighting about where the picture came from, so can we not?

So, last week I emailed Psychology Today and complained, because their online Advanced Search-for-a-Therapist thing lets you select that you are lesbian, gay, or transgendered–but does not include the word “bisexual” anywhere.

I wrote in and told them that I had worked as a hotline counselor and given out many referrals myself, and knew that it was important when finding a therapist to find one who wouldn’t judge you for your orientation–and that it was just as important for bisexuals, because unfortunately there is prejudice on both sides of the fence.

They wrote me back this week and said thank you, and that they would change it!

Sometimes being impulsively vocal pays off.  It goes to show that you should speak up when  you see something that doesn’t seem right to you — you might make a difference.

Now, if only I could get those Myspace advertisers to respond to my complaints about their sexism…  or find a way to send a complaint email without having to register for “findaman.com”…