Here’s the link to the story on CNN.

First…It’s a college.  These people are adults and should be treated as such.

Second, I feel like I’m missing something if the majority of the Safe Space people said that the ban was warranted.  This means that either

a. The safe zone people are completely ignorant of transgendered people’s needs.

b. The safe zone people know something that we don’t.

The article writer would have been well served to interview one of them.

Regardless, it’s a policy that discriminates against transgendered people. Period.

“”We are talking about five students who are living a gay lifestyle that is leading them to dress a way we do not expect in Morehouse men,” he said.

This appears to be the statement of a man who has no inkling of the difference between “gay lifestyle” and “transgendered”.  You’d think that a person who has PhD in the title of his name would have SOME idea that gay and transgendered aren’t the same thing.

For those who are confused:

Gay: A person who is attracted sexually and romantically only to members of his/her same gender.

Transgender: A person who feels as though they were born in the wrong body.  There are Male-to-Female and Female-to-Male varieties.  An FtM transgendered person usually feels that they are more comfortable wearing women’s clothing and living life as a woman would, not for sexual reasons but because they identify strongly as women.  FtM feels that they are more comfortable wearing men’s clothing and living life as a man would, not for sexual reasons, but because they identify strongly as men. Many, but not all, transgendered people have an operation which changes the genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics to a configuration more closely approximating that of the preferred gender.

Gay people are not transgendered any more frequently than straight people.

Transgendered people aren’t gay any more frequently than non-transgendered people.

Dr. Bynum makes the assumption that a man who dresses like a woman is somehow “inappropriate”.  What does this say about women?  They’re inferior?  That a man shouldn’t dirty himself with the articles of women?  That dressing in a certain way renders one immoral?

Get over it Moorehouse.  People are people.  They’re different in a billion different ways.  Stop trying to control things so damn much.  Talk to your professionals  and not your untrained volunteers when making decisions like this.  I would recommend talking to a psychologist who deals with transgendered people and ideas.  Then make your decision.

What you’re doing is taking a human being’s life, which is already difficult, and then cramming organizational discrimination on top of that.

I just read a news story that said that the Republicans and “moderate” Democrats (aka republicans) were attacking the health care public option by saying that it could lead to a single payer system!

Why would we not want a single payer system?  There is tons of evidence that says a single payer system works wonderfully.  Higher taxes, sure, but the EVERYONE is covered.

The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats actually care about their fellow human beings, and Republicans are exceedingly selfish and uncaring.  How can someone NOT care about other people?

Makes me sick.

Fear that it might lead to a single payer system.  FUCK YOU!  Shawn has thousands of dollars in medical bills from 2 trips to the emergency room when he was having massive pain in his abdomen.  He prized his credit, he was always very careful with bills, refuses to get a credit card; now his credit is destroyed because we cannot afford to pay these ridiculous medical bills.  I just flat refuse to go the emergency room.  I rarely get sick, but when I do, I’ll hold out until I can get to a cheaper clinic, but even then, the bills that come out of it are ridiculous.

Canada.  I just want to go to Canada and get out of this Idiocracy that we live in.  Shawn says that it will all change, just wait and see.  I don’t want to waste my life living in a country that doesn’t want me in it and is run by heartless fucking bastards.

I’m just disgusted.

I’m taking some drug and alcohol classes at school. I didn’t expect them to be earth shattering, but I’m pretty interested.

I learned something the other day that has had a pretty profound effect on me.

It’s about abandonment. A person who is abandoned at a young age is more likely to be a perfectionist and have anger issues…especially self-anger.

Abandonment takes many forms. Abandonment can be simple abandonment. Mom drops you off and moves to california… Or abandonment can be abuse, emotional or physical.

They all lead the child to try to be as perfect as they can be so that they don’t ever have to go through the pain of being abandoned again. This is reinforced when the adults in the child’s life are overly critical when the child makes a mistake, such as spilling milk, breaking a glass, etc.

So now the child feels that they cannot make any mistakes at all. There is a fear that ANY mistake will make the adult stop loving them and abandon them in some way.

As an adult, we become the adult. Whenever we make a mistake, we yell at ourselves. We get angry for two reasons:

First is that we’re not perfect. We need to be perfect so that people don’t abandon us!

Second is that we’ve become the overly-critical parent. Their voice is still in our head telling us that mistakes are to be punished!

We then have kids of our own and become the overly-critical parent to them…and the cycle continues.

I’ve been noticing this a lot lately. Shawn hates it when I blow up when I make a mistake or fail at something. If I drop something, I get angry at myself. If I can’t fix something I get angry at myself. If he criticizes me about ANYTHING I get angry about it. Not violent, of course, I’m not a violent person. But I do get defensive and angry. It has to do with the perfectionism.

If I’ve failed in my perfection, then the best evidence of that is when someone ELSE points it out. Then I get angry at myself, but then redirect that anger at him, because he was the one who said the thing that made me angry at myself…

So. What I’ve been trying to do lately, is be aware of those moments when I start to get angry about something stupid which is not really something that I should be getting angry over.

(such as just now, when I did the strike-through on the word “stupid” in the previous paragraph, and the strike-through carried on to the next word, and even when I deleted it from the next word it then carried on through the NEXT word…I got angry…at myself for not using the program right.  I got angry at the program for not being designed right…..but why get angry at all?)

I hope to learn more about this and to cure my perfectionism and anger.  It leads to a lot of problems in my life.  Specifically, right now, the fact that I am keeping myself from doing any reading for my classes.

Perfectionism leads to avoidance.  If I can’t do it right, why even try?  Which is how a person can be a perfectionist AND a slob at the same time.  One learns to avoid anything that might be unpleasant to think about.  Cleaning is unpleasant.  Studying is unpleasant.  So I can just pathologically avoid both (I have a low threshold for clutter, so I clean when it becomes unbearable…which is frequently…but it really should never get unbearable, should it?)

This is where I have my problem.  How do I stop this avoidance/procrastination trap that I’m in?  It’s bound to destroy my GPA and my hopes for PhD…

I guess I spent some time not really being interested in music that much.  I don’t remember really liking anything until I heard Wham! on the radio.

Wham!: Make it Big (1984)

This was a big departure for me.  There was only one radio station in the mountains and it was an AM soft rock station.  At the time they were playing Alan Parsons Project’s Time and Eye in the Sky.  Occasionally they’d play a new song called Careless Whisper by a group called Wham!

I loved this song.  I loved hearing it on the radio.  But I didn’t buy the album until I was about 14.  Careless Whisper and Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

This was shortly after the debut of MTV and my brother and I used to watch MTV occasionally, when Dad wasn’t home.  This video made me crazy!  The burgeoning gay kid in me was nuts for this sexy guy bouncing all over the stage.  I thought, though I wouldn’t ever have voiced it, that George Michael was just the most handsome guy in the entire world. I was completely confused by the T-shirt saying “CHOOSE LIFE”. So was everyone else. I guess it meant that people should choose to live in a more energetic sense. It was co-opted by the anti-abortion people AFTER this video was released…

I visited my aunt and my grandmother in about 1985.  I only know the year because that summer Madonna had a picture come out in playboy.  I thought she’d posed for it as a bad girl.  But her image wasn’t really all that bad at the time.  So I wondered why she’d pose for Playboy.  I just learned, through reading, that she posed for that photo in 1979.  She was a struggling model/actress at the time and did it for quick cash.

Anyway, that summer I was introduced to New Wave music in Salt Lake City.  I was staying for some time with my Aunt and her son, my cousin, Jeff.  There was a girl across the street, she was very cool and very weird.  She said she was a New Waver.  I had no idea what that meant.  I’d just come out of the mountains of Idaho.  She never did explain it to me very well.  Through her I discovered Tears for Fears.  I never got as obscurely New Wave as she was.  She was older and had more mature musical taste.  I did find myself VERY attracted to the self-expression that those in the New Wave community expressed.  Odd hair styles like those of Flock of Seagulls and Cyndi Lauper were common.  If different things had happened in my life, I could have branched off right here.  She was the first person I ever came out to.  I was 13 years old and scared to death about it and excited.  She told me that she was bisexual and I just burned to talk to her about it.  When I told her she told me that it might be a phase, but it might not.  Her and her lifestyle were not judgmental.  It was my first taste of comfort.

Anyway.  After I left Salt Lake City, I went directly, against my father’s wishes, to see my beloved step-mother.  Oddly enough, this trip had been arranged by my mother and my aunt.  They knew that I’d missed this woman, who’d comforted me after the dissolution of my family and abandonment by my mother. My father was afraid, for some reason, that I’d run away permanently to live with her.  I only wish I had been able to.  What a life I might have had with a family that gave a shit…

Anyway: My grandmother had taken me to the store to buy a cassette for the bus ride.  I chose:

Tina Turner: Private Dancer

I had recently seen Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.  Tina Turner, who I’d also seen on MTV, had played a character called “Aunty Entity” and I LOVED IT!  There was a song called We Don’t Need Another Hero from that.  I wandered around the store a bit.  I think I was looking for the soundtrack to Beyond Thunderdome, but I only found Private Dancer.   I was disappointed, but I decided to get it anyway.

The bus ride is scary for a 13 year old boy.  Especially when you’ve never really traveled anywhere by yourself before.  I sat in my window seat and put my headphones on and pretty much closed my eyes for the ride.  I had some books and my my Tina Turner.  The trip was probably a full day.  I remember that I woke up once and the bus was empty.  Everyone was gone.  It was freaky, and I was freaked out.  But someone came back on and told me that the bus had stopped at the Stateline Casino.  Everyone was gambling. hehehe.

So when I listen to this album, I have memories of that trip.  Mostly of sitting on a bus looking at scenery and being amazed at how DIFFERENT California was from anywhere I’d ever been before.  So glamorous!  Palm Trees! Convertibles EVERYWHERE! 1985 California must have been an interesting place.

I got to California, and my Step-Mother, Mary, took me to a store to buy another cassette.  I bought:

“Weird Al” Yankovic: Dare to be Stupid

This started my love affair with Weird Al.  I memorized this entire cassette.  I listened to it over and over and over.  Mary’s apartment in Fresno had a swimming pool.  I used to sit in the sun beside the pool and listen to the album for hours.  I was only there for a couple of weeks, but I had a blast in California.  I’d seen lots of music videos on MTV.  They all portrayed this carefree lifestyle lived in perpetual sunset, with palm trees and people driving and being beautiful and rich.  I felt like I’d gone there to live amongst them.

I returned to the Mountains for the remainder of the summer.  I think what followed was stretched over a few summers.  When I was 14 I went to Lava Hot Springs, to see my biological mother and her asshole husband.  This was the guy who’d convinced my mother that it was a good idea for her to drop off her kid at her daughter’s house and move to California.  He didn’t like the fact that I was, as a 7 year old kid, a bit angry over the breakup of my parent’s marriage and didn’t consider him a fitting replacement for my father, because he got drunk and yelled and hit people.  I told him once, after he ordered me to do one thing or another, that he wasn’t my father.  After which he decided that he would gain my fealty by beating me.  Soon after, my mother dropped me off at my eldest sister’s house for a “couple of days” and I didn’t see her again for about 5 years.

It’s interesting how there is a tie from music to memory.  Just writing this is drawing forth all sorts of memories.

Back to music:

I liked Lava Hot Springs.  It was pretty.  There was a lot of water.  A HUGE swimming pool with a VERY TALL diving board.  I don’t think I ever got brave enough to jump off the really high diving board.

The same sister who my mother had dropped me off with had moved to Lava Hot Springs.  They just called it Lava.  I met my first girlfriend there.  Her name was Tammy.  My niece, Charity, and I were very close and  always had been.  We pretty much went everywhere together.  Charity had a cassette of:

Olivia Newton-John: Greatest Hits (Too many memories.  Blew out my brain.  I will be back to finish soon.)

Here’s Mad World by Tears for Fears

Anyway, were talking music here.

Olivia Newton-John: Greatest Hits

Madonna: True Blue (1985)

Wham!: Make it Big (1984)

Tina Turner: Private Dancer (1984)

“Weird Al” Yankovic: Dare to be Stupid: (1985)