Things have been busy on this front. I read a memoir on a pair of siblings sent to a fundamentalist school in the Dominican Republic, made it through a couple chapters of bell hook’s “Feminism Is For Everybody”, and I just got another shift at work, so I’m up to 40 hours a week. I am tired. I keep telling myself I’m only working all these crazy hours (11pm-7am) until the holidays are over sometime in January/February, and then I’ll be reduced to 16-20 hours a week. So I need to pick up all the hours I can now.
I have this tremendous to-do list that I keep trying to get to, but the internet keeps sucking me in with its vortex of knowledge. It’s mostly little stuff. I need to call the bank and find out when my checks will be here. I need to call TRowePrice and get my Roth IRA fixed, and I have projects for people’s Yule gifts that I really need to get started on. I need to check Nelnet and be sure my student loans are being paid off the way they should. I’m trying to gain some muscle while exercising with my mom/walking the dog and work is very active so all my muscles are crying for help… Plus, I’m trying desperately to go vegetarian again (I felt so much better that way) but keep forgetting to plan ahead so I end up eating what everyone else is eating because I sleep when I should be cooking. McDonalds:1, Me:0.
I feel like I’m not doing too well with my spiritual practice, either. I don’t have time to do meditations and my room isn’t clean enough to set up an altar. I am, in the spirit of simplicity, currently paring my possessions down to 100 things though. Right now I’m at 130, down from 147. I’m going to keep paring down, slowly. Some things are wearing out and I’m going to have to take into serious consideration whether I should replace them or not. I miss my meditations and I really need to make time for them again.
A couple things are pissing me off right now too, the first being religion. I cannot believe the things people justify in the name of religion. Now, my political views are so far left that most liberals would say I’m off the deep end, but some of this stuff is just common sense to me. Let gay and lesbian couples marry. They’re in love, and it doesn’t hurt you any. Let them adopt as a family unit. How come hetero parents are allowed to pop out all the kids they want with no consideration for what kind of parents they’ll be, but if a gay or lesbian couple wants a kid, we scream about them “turning kids gay” or the kids “not having role models for their gender”. That is sexist thinking right there, folks. You don’t have to have a different gender parent than yourself to turn out right. You need a considerate, loving parent who listens and can provide the basic necessities of life along with affection and interaction.
Sexism is making me angry too. Why do commercials for kids’ toys only show the socially approved gendered child playing with them? I loved trains as a kid, and I played wood-shop with my brother’s plastic tool bench too. We even had a little battery powered screw driver that you could take the little cars apart with and put them back together again… And I played with dolls and horses too. My brothers played restaurant and Barbie with me more times than I can remember. Why don’t ads for trains or plastic dinosaurs feature girls as well as boys? Why aren’t little boys included in ads for the latest playschool plastic kitchen?
Gender stereotyping is limiting, and it has seeped into our culture in more ways than we can imagine. We assume that little girls like dolls and little boys like cars, but perhaps they only like them because they are expected to like them, or because that’s what they’ve been given to play with. If Mommy was a racecar driver, I bet Sally would want some matchbox cars of her own…
J and I are going to go to EMU in early November to apply and see how his GI bill/financial aid will work out. I’m hoping both of us will get in. Right now, I plan to major in Gender Studies. That is what I’m passionate about. I want to study race, gender, sex, and what is cultural and what is instinctual and what is learned… I want to grapple with trans/cis issues, LGBT rights, anything and everything I can get my hands on. I realize this degree may not appear immediately marketable to some people, but I wouldn’t be doing this for any kind of high paying career. I want to work with non-profits, and earn enough to keep my bills paid. Being wealthy seems like a distraction when so much of the world lives in poverty. Wealth is a barrier that keeps us from understanding how the rest of the world lives. If I have enough, I want that to be enough.
Perhaps that is my spiritual purpose in right now. Right now I feel dependent. We can’t make it on our own, so we’re renting from my folks. I’m dependent on people at my job, hoping they like me, hoping I work fast enough to make whatever quota’s been set. There are two ways to wealth- you can earn a lot, or you can spend very, very little. I’m going to try the spending very little, because that’s the option I have.
Autumn's Pagan Life 