What the Dragon Said: A Love Story

by Catherynne M. Valente

http://www.tor.com/stories/2012/04/what-the-dragon-said-a-love-story

I cried. I couldn’t help myself, I just started crying. Someone who I look up to so much talking about how she deals with her cyclical depression.

Starts at 31:00 in the audio:  http://www.npr.org/2012/03/27/148611615/rachel-maddow-the-fresh-air-interview?ft=1&f=1020

Transcript: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=148611615

GROSS: …I’ve never thought of you as depressive.

MADDOW: Hmm. You know, I do – I love my job, and I love politics. I really – I felt like when I got my job at MSNBC, like I had won the job lottery, and three and a half years, whatever it is, later, I still feel like I have won the job lottery. And I think part of that is thinking, oh, it’s going to go away at any moment. People are going to realize that I’m a great fraud and it’ll end, so I better make sure this is a good show because it’ll be my last. Part of me feels that way every day.

But yeah, no, I’m – ever since – essentially ever since puberty, every since I was 11 or 12, I guess, I’ve had cyclical depression. That’s, you know, something that has been a defining feature of my life as an adult. And it’s manageable, but it’s real. And it doesn’t take away from my joy in my work or my energy, but coping with depression is something that is part of the everyday way that I live and have lived as long as I can remember.

GROSS: Does the focus that you need and the adrenaline surge that you get doing your show help with depression when you have it?

MADDOW: No. Depression for me is you can’t distract your way out of it, and I think people can understand the difference, if you’ve never been depressed, you can still understand the difference between sadness and depression. It’s like the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. And the opposite of happiness isn’t necessarily sadness, it’s disconnection.

And you know, when you are depressed, it’s like the rest of the world is the mothership and you’re out there on a little pod and your line gets cut, and you just don’t connect with anything, you sort of – you sort of disappear. And so it’s not something you can, I think, talk therapy out of. I know some people approach it that way. For me it doesn’t work that way. It really is kind of a chemical thing. And yeah, you get some adrenaline from the work, but adrenaline isn’t a cure.

GROSS: Does it affect your performance when you’re depressed?

MADDOW: It affects my ability to focus and my preparation. So because I tend to know sort of – I can tell it’s coming – my depression isn’t all the time, so if I’m coming up on a bout of depression, a few things happen, so I can tell it’s happening. Like I just - I’m used to it. I lose my sense of smell and some other things like that happen. And…

GROSS: Sounds like a migraine.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

MADDOW: It is. It’s a little – actually, that’s very – I have friends who have migraines. I’ve luckily never coped with that but it’s the same kind of thing. Like you know it’s coming; it has nothing to do with anything else in your life. It’s like a train and you just ride until it slows down enough that you can get off. And if I know it’s coming I will try to schedule my work life around not having to, for example, read a complete book.

So I’m going to do a book interview. Because it will be hard for me to – with my schedule I will often need to read a book, as I’m sure you know, in a day and getting a book read plus a show done on a day where I’m pretty low and I can’t focus is a hard row to hoe. And so I try to adjust my schedule around it to accommodate.

GROSS: Well, you would never know watching you.

MADDOW: Oh, good.

GROSS: Never. Never know.

MADDOW: I’m not embarrassed. I’m not embarrassed by it. You know, I mean, it’s no – I don’t see it as having any moral component. I’m not embarrassed by it and I know that a lot of people live with it and cope with and treat depression in different ways. And I’ve been able to be a high-functioning person with depression all my life. And I expect – I don’t expect it to ever go away.

It would be great if it did but in the meantime, I can make a life around it.

GROSS: Well, thank you for being willing to talk about that.

MADDOW: Oh, sure.

http://www.alternet.org/visions/154518/why_we_have_to_go_back_to_a_40-hour_work_week_to_keep_our_sanity/?page=entire by Sara Robinson

Putting aside the busted title [1], I have many thoughts about this article, too many for a tweet, most of them short.

I love my job, worker owned cooperatives rock! 

We’re not fully where we want to be yet in terms of everyone in the company working the hours we want to work, but Palante Tech has priorities of sustainability of work, and making capacity concerns trump profit. We’ve been putting the lessons from this article into practice, without knowing it, and it’s been pretty good.

When unions lose, workers lose.

How is it that “eight for work, eight for sleep, and eight for what we will” has become such a radical idea? Have we lost ground on every fight for human dignity? The industries that Unions helped build have been dying in the US, and some of the new industries that have sprung up have been quietly or not so quietly blocking unions getting a foothold [2]. I recognize that my feelings about unions and the labor movement come from my grandmother, whose father was a Jewish tailor in London, but still I firmly believe in both the idea and practice of unions.

How does this relate to the work of activism?

I know many passionate activists who work much more than 40 hours at their causes, some of them as employees at a non-profit, some of them as volunteers. I don’t think any of them should start replicating more of the patterns of the capitalist work structure, but I have to wonder if the lessons of this article might help us all be more effective at fighting the powers that be. Is the 40 hour week a tool of the master or is it a tool of the people? I know that I have often pushed myself well past 40 hours of “work” per week, and missed sleep, in service of a play or a festival or a campaign or a client or some other thing I cared a great deal about. Many folks have written about and worked on fighting burnout in activist communities, but thinking about this article, I wonder if pushing ourselves the way we do actually hurts the movements we hope to support.

[1] I refuse to buy in to capitalism’s definition of sanity.

[2] Example: http://gawker.com/5857523/apple-prepares-to-crush-apple-store-unions

Last night you made me cry. 

Last night you told me I was beautiful and made me cry. 

Last night you held my body close to yours, told me I was beautiful and made me cry. 

Last night you kissed me, held my body close to yours, told me I was beautiful and made me cry.

Last night you left me speechless, kissed me, held my body close to yours, told me I was beautiful and made me cry.

Last night you made me scream, left me speechless, kissed me, held my body close to yours, told me I was beautiful and made me cry. 

Last night you fucked me till I came three times, made me scream, left me speechless, kissed me, held my body close to yours, told me I was beautiful and made me cry. 

Last night you looked at me.

You fucked me till I came three times, you made me scream, you left me speechless, you kissed me, you held my body close to yours, you told me I was beautiful, and you made me cry. 

And this morning you are gone.

fuckyeahmenfolk:

By Gabe Moses

Forget the images you’ve learned to attach
To words like cock and clit,
Chest and breasts.
Break those words open
Like a paramedic cracking ribs
To pump blood through a failing heart.
Push your hands inside.
Get them messy.
Scratch new definitions on the bones.

Get rid of the old…

(Source: genderqueerchicago.blogspot.com)

Today I got my New York Public Library card in the mail. I already had a Brooklyn Public Library card, so I didn’t need to get it to check books out. I got it so that I could log in to the Oxford English Dictionary using the NYPL ( http://t.co/P9HMdwy ).

I love the OED. I love reading about words, their histories, their usages, and their etymologies. One thing I hadn’t done yet though, was look up my own name in the OED. My first name wasn’t in there (no surprise, it isn’t English) but my last name, Khan, was.

There was the meaning I knew ( http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/103180 ) that Khan is a title for descendants of Chingīz Khan or more generally rulers or officials in Central Asia. What I didn’t know was the second meaning ( http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/103181 ) derived from the Arabic خان (khaan): A building for the accommodation of travelers, an inn.

This made me pause. It’s always been important to me that my home was a welcome place for others to stay, a place where those who needed could come and be fed. I knew that my parents did this, and that my grandparents did as well, and I knew that it was a pattern of behavior that I got from my family. What I didn’t know was that it was possibly inherent in the name itself.

I make my home a Khan home, and for as long as this line of the Khan family exists, that means travelers are welcome.

Arranged as one tumblr post as opposed to several tweets.

I’m flying pretty high right now, woo endorphins, don’t know when I’ll feel grounded again.

I think that I wear the same thing every day partially because it’s so much easier than trying to figure out which aspects of myself feel prevalent each morning and dressing accordingly. I’d spend so much time trying to figure myself out each morning getting dressed, and I’m late to things enough already.

I’m getting more woo, wearing my amethyst crystal on a chain the last few days, and I’m holding my amethyst sphere right now against my chest for grounding.

It’s really important for me to remember that even when I fully exert myself, when I release my energy with full ferocity I can still lose, I can still be defeated.

There is a balance somewhere between being a joyous hedonist and holding my calm, which aren’t at direct odds, but come from different places.

The people in my life right now are wonderful and I am so full of love and gratitude and glee (and probably oxytocin and serotonin).

I’m sad that I broke my rubber wrist restraints today, but there is no question about it, it was totally worth it.

I want to be reliable to my friends and community and thought of as such, but I fear that sometimes I am not.

Everything going on in Egypt and the rest of the region right now is so amazing and exciting and pokes me just a little into thinking about how I am not connected to any Muslim community right now, and haven’t been for years.

I spent two hours yesterday unsuccessfully trying to figure out the typeface of the Dead Kennedys logo in order to make a Ph’nglui Cthulhu patch.

I’m just the tiniest bit worried that the kinky play that I do and the accompanying headspaces have a big sign over them saying “THIS WAY LIES MADNESS.” I’m also concerned that “THIS WAY LIES SANITY.”

I realize that I might want to be more discrete about the life I lead, but with the life I want to lead in the future I don’t see a convincing reason to do so. I used to have piercings next to my eyes, I gave up on passing for normal a while ago.

Tumblr app for iPhone leads to late night brain dumps, heh.

<3

It holds me tight, that shirt you gave to me
I pull it down to feel it on my skin
I’m wearing nothing else, as you can see
my asshole aches for you to be within

I wish that I could fit your fist inside
but I suppose your cock will have to do
You’ll put it on, and on you I will ride
and you and I will fuck and shtup and screw

and when we’re done your girlfriend will arrive
astride her unicorn with cock in hand
and if what you two do I do survive
I’ll sing your praises loudly cross the land

a sonnet is a trifle much to flirt,
consider it a barter for your shirt.

(Source: forthesamereasonibreathe)

I just came back to DA to look at a picture (http://fav.me/d3wghd) after over 6 years of using it (off and on) as a desktop background.

6+ years ago, I wrote this as a comment on that picture:

I’ve looked at this piece over and over and over again, and I just have to tell you how strong a reaction I have to it. I feel a truly intense mixture of joy, love, jealousy and pain whenever I see this picture. It is such a beautiful portrayal of love between two women, and I am not a woman (yet). I don’t know why, but this piece, more than anything else, makes me think about how far I have to go towards being truly happy and also about how truly happy one can be. Prose fails here to explain the way I feel, but thank you for this piece of beauty. If you were ever able to get this as a deviantart print, I am sure that I would be far from the only one who would one.

———


Since then I have found love, more than once and I am now quite happily living in Brooklyn with a wonderful community of friends and lovers.

Thank you to the creator of this for giving me hope when I needed it.