pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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LIVE AS IF YOUR HAIR IS ON FIRE

Just went out in 99° weather to pick up prescription refills and man is it miserable out there! Worked outside in the heat for two hours last night too and it just exhausted me. (Put the edger attachment on my rototiller and spruced up my messy yard, then tried to get the worst of the grass out of the cracks in my driveway. Time to buy some cement patch. Not hard to do, but just one more thing to add to my already-burgeoning list.) And we still have the dog days to endure....

My uncle's funeral service is either at 10 or 11 a.m. on Saturday morning, so I guess we'll be on the road around 4:15 a.m., sigh. Since Pottergrrl won't even arrive till 9 p.m. Friday night, we are going to be two sleepy girls! Guess we'll just pump ourselves full of caffeine though—or I will anyway; she can go back to sleep as soon as we get in the car.

Can't BELIEVE she's actually going to small-town South Cackylacky to attend this funeral. And I gotta admire her gumption.

The service is at my grandparents' (rabidly) primitive Baptist church in a tiny farming community. The church is small—maybe two rows of ten pews each, if memory serves—and does not have air conditioning, so a morning service makes sense. There's a graveside service after that and then a meal on the grounds.

Hard to believe Uncle Do, who was only ten years older than me and ten years younger than my mother, is already dead.

Mama says they finally reached his son, who is in the coast guard. Luckily, his sub was off-shore in Alaska for repairs and not out at sea, so he's being flown in and will arrive late tonight. He hasn't seen Don in a long time (since he's been out at sea), so this will be particularly hard on him.

I am very uncomfortable with the thought of attending this funeral because I wrote an article about how weird it was to attend my grandmother's funeral service there and a church member discovered my article and read it to the entire congregation. This caused what amounted to a family crisis and some members of my mother's family refused to speak to me—umm, some maybe STILL refuse to speak to me.

My aunt sent a nasty letter and two dog-eared and heavily highlighted books that, I suppose, were supposed to enlighten me to my sinful queer ways (just in case I somehow missed the numerous everyday homophobic messages that bounce around our culture or Fred Phelps's God Hates Fags! signs on the nightly news or the TV preachers' pleas for money to stop the evil queers or any of those other homophobes who insist that I'm going to Hell because I actually choose to [to paraphrase Mary Oliver] let the soft animal of my warm body love whom it loves).

My aunt asked why I shamed my family by writing that article and I composed many, many responses (and very nearly donated some books to her church library—Stranger at the Gate, for example) but, in the end, I decided my best response was to not reply at all and to let my article stand as my comment on the matter.

To my mind, it already answers her question, only I don't consider it shameful. Do wish I'd left out the line about stifling my five-finger response, but nevertheless stand by every single word I wrote and got comments from straight people who said they thought about family gatherings differently after reading the piece.

Still, I am well aware of the fact that I violated an unspoken Southern rule about never revealing information about your family to outsiders. Don't care though because how can you talk about your life without talking about the primary players in it? (And, frankly, this article is nothing compared to my novel). Aunt Becky can just re-read the damn article if she wants an explanation!

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The Baptist compulsion to silence differing world views, to cast people with ideologies that disagree with their own as evil and to find us deserving of the fires of their fictitious Hell are so, so familiar to me. And Baptist women just confound me. Well, as do Muslim women (or Catholic women, for that matter), or any women who embrace a tradition that places them in a subordinate position, who participate in retrograde religious traditions that insist that they "submit graciously" to men.

These traditions refuse to ordain women, confine them to marginal positions with little power, insist that they be led by men, that they submit to men, that they are somehow inherently inferior. I inherited this legacy, but reject it. Still, I wonder what keeps those women there? Is it familiar ritual? internalized oppression? a willingness to pick-and-choose what they do and don't believe? a preference for male leaders? What?

I've never been able to explain this whole Southern notion of family honor to nonSoutherners, but it reminds me of the little I know of Arab culture. Honor, in Arab culture,

requires that women give up their individuality in order to maintain the reputation and prospects of the men in their lives. This turns women into communal property, so that their lives don't actually belong to them but to their families, their tribes, and sometimes even their nations.

I guess I relate to Manji. I want to break the damn silence, talk about how oppressive it is to grow up rabidly Baptist or rabidly anything that minimizes our beautiful selves. I want to write articles that describe how oppressive it feels to return to Baptist events as a queer who rejects that Baptist sledgehammer that so many people believe gives them the right to define—and discriminate against—me. (And don't even get me started on a Supreme-Court nominee who already has a record of seeking to weaken the separation between church and state. He can tip the scales and that scares me, makes me want to mail copies of The Handmaid's Tale to every citizen of our country.)

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Not surprisingly, I have been thinking about death and new relationships. It didn't occur to me until yesterday that my mother and Don have the same ten-year gap in age as Lad and I do. I bet she adored him as much as I adore Lad. How awful to lose a sibling.

Buddhist philosophy recognizes samsara, the endless cycle of suffering, which the author of an article (about competition) that I was reading last night explores. All gain ends in loss, he notes, yet we compete and fabricate a chain of desire that keeps us in samsara. "Whatever we gather, we will lose" he reminds us or, our pleasure will eventually lead to pain. "Gain and loss are meaningless preoccupations that we use to foster the illusion of a permanent self."

Sigh.

Buddhist meditation texts advise that, when we become familiar with the truth of our impermanence, we should practice sitting/living as if our hair were on fire.

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In other news, I need to call my mechanic tomorrow and ask him when VW water pumps typically wear out because I've been obsessing about mine blowing and leaving me stranded in the middle of the night with an overheated car and potentially damaged motor.

My car has almost 80K on it already (all those trips to Boston for the Ginger's's LARP weekends). I replaced the serpentine belt as a precaution when they were doing a bunch of labor anyway—figured I'd save on labor costs in the long run—but know a fuel pump and water pump are in my near future. When I finally deposit that check for $2,000 (nope, not here yet!) I may have these installed as a precaution, but want to know typical timeline first.

(And all I know right now is they better not decide to fail on my early-morning trip to and from South Carolina!

Man, I miss those pre-computer days when motors were easy to work on and made sense. I don't even know where to begin with this VW motor that doesn't even LOOK like a motor in the first place. It's true! If anything, it looks like one of those THULE storage bins that you strap to the top of your car!

LISTENING TO: ani defranco (fuck you and your untouchable face)

READING: J-14 Style Summer Special. This is a sad, sad magazine aimed at fourteen-year-old suburban girls and one day soon I will quote from select articles. Why am I reading this, you ask? Well, I'm designing a book for adolescents and want the format to appeal to that age group.

I think I'm going to end up illustrating it too, because none of the outside graphic designers are affordable.

5:21 p.m. - 2005-07-21

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