Ceri B.

Not complaining, either. For best results, imagine the subject line spoken in the pleased style of animated Ringo, about 2 minutes into this clip from Yellow Submarine. 

I continue to block myself from reading sites where I tend to get into lengthy unproductive arguments, or simply get depressed by the displays of arrogant, bigoted callousness. It's not a pure break—I do end up editing my hosts file every few days to take the occasional peek at this site or that. But I always end up putting the blocks back in after just a few hours' reading, or even less.

This is my second month in a row of making a small donation and planning to skip a meal or two out to make up for it, for the satisfaction of doing something. Last month it was a donation to my Representative, since he's one of the folks in the House of Representatives committed to blocking any "health care reform" that lacks a public insurance option. It's not enough—they need to scrap all talk of individual mandates, and for that matter just go to sane, sensible, time-tested single-payer of some sort. But it'd be a real improvement, unlike a bill without it, and besides, he's reliably a good voter and worth some support.

This month it was the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. I can't say I agree with all their positions, but I can say that I'm sure they're fighting important fights and clearly deserving of my support. Furthermore, the kind of disagreement I'm having with some of their stance is the productive kind, where I find myself challenged by a clash between facts I recognize as true, principles I agree are moral and justice, and policy stances I've taken in the past that now seem less than entirely satisfactory. That's the sort of reflecting I'm happy to do right now, and much better for my soul than the Nth iteration of trying to persuade homophobes and reactionaries of basic realities they'll keep denying anyway.

It feels good to know that I'm doing some tangible good. I'd like to take part in some activism myself, but right now health still makes it not feasible. Supporting others in the good fight is a marvelous cure for feelings of powerlessness.

Now that I've got a bit of money in my account again, and more coming (particularly after I get this next review written), it's time to do some spending on something trans-related for myself. Not sure what yet, but it'll be something for fun, that makes me happy and feel like I'm making progress on expressing the person within. You'll read all about it, I'm sure. :)

Since systemic illness keeps me mostly at home and since I are a brite 'un raised by parents who shared with us their love of learning and appreciation for rhetoric, I read a lot. I was an avid Usenet reader and poster back in the day, and I like the blogosphere. But every so often I realize that I'm frittering away passion on it that I want for other things, and I'm having another of those moments now.

Really, though, it's not the blog posts that rot my soul. It's the commenters, far more often. So I'm spending the afternoon throwing blogs I like into Google Reader and then adding to /etc/hosts so that I will have to work harder if I want to expose myself to the toxic trash in the comments. I'm hoping this'll leave me more free time and soul for reading, thinking, and acting about stuff in the world I'm moving into, instead.