Monster Assault – a fantastic guest post written by my son about his plans to make the world a better place by dressing as monsters and scaring bad guys.
I think most people in the West have an annual period of reflection around Christmas and New Year, thinking of years past and the future. My birthday just passed, comimg at the end of January as it always does. I expected to feel more contemplative than I do.
I am finding I no longer count my life in Januaries, starting from that cold day in Florida thirty-three years ago. Now I count my life in milestones. Ten years since my son was born. Six years next month since my abortion. Eight years of disabling physical pain. Continue reading Annual Reflection
Parents everywhere have heard those words at times when they knew full well no accident happened. The desire to shift blame seems almost instinctual. Siblings blame each other and only-children concoct imaginary friends to take the fall.
Because this tendency is so strong, I skirt around it. I don’t argue with someone else about what they really meant; I can make highly educated guesses based on past behavior or context, but I can’t see into their mind.
Instead I focus on impact and responsibility. Something can have unintended consequences we didn’t intend, but still be our responsibility. “You may not have meant to hurt me when you jumped on the couch where I’m sitting, but I hurt.”
I think this approach can work with adults sometimes too. If intent isn’t magic, if harm prevention and reduction is the purpose in confronting someone, sometimes intent can be overlooked. “Accident isn’t an excuse” as I tell my child.
That doesn’t mean intent is meaningless. It means it’s not always the best focus. Sometimes motive matters a lot – but that’s evident after. Someone who hurts me accidentally is less likely to repeat the behavior later.
I believe a proper apology consists of three parts:
1. I’m sorry.
2. I am responsible.
3. I won’t do it again.
I draw a distinction between blame or fault and responsibility. We can be responsible for harm without malice. Accepting responsibility lets the person I’ve harmed feel better, in a way that swearing I didn’t mean to won’t.
“Activists build tiny home community for the homeless!”
“Tiny Houses for Homeless Help”
“Support My Fundraiser to Build Tiny Homes for Homeless”
There are more empty actual-sized houses than homeless individuals (including families who would share a home) in the United States. We don’t need sheds.
It’s hard to escape this sentiment, that tiny homes – usually defined as single family dwellings under 400 square feet – are either an ideal long-term solution to homelessness, or at least a temporary solution worth pursuing in the face of immediate need. While the tiny homes people lovingly construct for themselves sit pretty close to that 400 SF mark, the “homes” built for homeless people to live in are closer to about 40 SF. They are most often glorified sheds, with no kitchen, no plumbing, no insulation. They do not pass any building codes for human habitation, nor should they. They are not safe.
There are different motivations at work here. There are the do-gooders, the people passionate about helping those less fortunate than themselves, who see an obvious unmet human need when they see someone sleeping on the street, yet at the same time don’t see an obvious unmet human need when they see that same person sleeping in a shed. Overturning entrenched political (dis)interest in solving homelessness seems impossible, but hammering together a few sheds on the weekend feels like something they can really do about the problem.
Then there are the environmentalists, eager to see scrap resources get used rather than go to a dump. Tiny houses, especially when they are for the homeless, use primarily reclaimed materials. At their worst, these types see homeless people as a type of ecological scavenger. Their influence in “feeding” the homeless contributed greatly to the current situation where most of the food “donated” is non-salable waste redirected to homeless people rather than the dump as a type of a human garbage disposal system.
Other people just like the supposed cost-savings of tiny homes. The initial materials costs are often used as a selling point of the concept, with “under $5,000” being reported positively in many stories. Of course, cheap means low-quality, as it always has. Four foot by ten foot sheds built of “reclaimed” materials may be cheap, but they aren’t real homes. The low price is achieved through volunteer untrained labor, second-hand goods, and a home too small to have guests over, or a dog, or a child. I don’t think many of the people reading this inside homes (rented or owned) would rather live somewhere a fraction of the size and with none of the amenities, built by volunteers rather than trained builders, even though it would cost less.
Few articles mention that at the end of participating in the building of these “homes” (without bathrooms or kitchens) the homeless remain homeless. They do not own these homes; they are “stewards” of them – beholden to certain rules and subject to eviction if the board members (people who live in real actual-sized homes) decide their stewardship is not good enough. The Madison tiny house community is considered the model of the form. It features 9 tiny “homes” and a large central building for the volunteers workshop, on a 1/3 acre lot that used to be a mechanic’s garage.
Like homeless shelters, tiny homes do not solve the problem of homelessness. Guaranteed minimum income for all (documented or not) and government provided homes for those who cannot obtain their own would actually solve poverty and homelessness. I know people mean well when they devote their hearts and souls and days off work to building sheds for homeless people to live in. They are thinking “This is so much better than living on the street!” They are not comparing it with what they should, living in a real home. If they were, they would see: tiny “homes” are no solution at all.
Pregnancy – the magical time in a woman’s life when she becomes a torso.
A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald, written by a woman denied caffeine at a cafe because she was visibly pregnant, has me thinking about pregnancy in public. I remember the shame and embarrassment I felt picking up my husband’s nightly 12-pack of beer in my second and third trimester. The alternative was letting him drive my car, despite the fact that his license had been suspended due to multiple DUIs and he wasn’t covered by my insurance. The lovely family who owned the corner store I went to never said a negative word; I think they knew who the beer was really for. But I at least imagined that every other customer in the store was judging me. Continue reading Pregnant in Public
I asked my Facebook friends to help me develop a list of money saving tips for middle class people from poor people, in response to all the money saving tips they’ve bestowed upon us over the years. The responses are a mixture of mirthful and morose, quite serious things they’ve actually had to do, and twists on useless advice we’ve all heard before. I’ve selected a few choice quotes for the various categories that emerged, but do read the whole thread here.
Sell that wallet!
Think of this as a challenge, like the Food Stamps Challenge except actually hard core. Live as if you were poor – put every scrap of money you earn over $10K a year into a long-term bond or trust where you cannot touch it. Follow the advice below. Unlike poor people who get no real benefit, if you undertook this challenge you’d have a large nest egg at the end of it. Yet somehow I imagine that the people most eager to offer “money saving” tips to others wouldn’t be interested in these. Continue reading Money Tips From Poor Folk (1/2)
How To Date Me: A White Queer Neurodivergent Depressed NB’s Guide is a guest post written by Patience Virtue and published with permission.
Dating is hard, Depression is even harder, so as I’m sure you can imagine, dating while depressed can range from exhausting, to nightmarishly terrifying, to an insurmountable obstacle of nope. And frankly I’m really really tired of the ableism in the dating world, which frankly just stems from the ableism in the world at large.
So, here are a few simple rules I’ve drafted for dating a depressed person. You will of course know that I’m depressed because I’ve put it in my goddamn dating profile. No fucking excuses. Continue reading Guest Post: How to Date Me
Even when they lived far away, the weight of Gig’s expectations, her standards, what she’d said God wanted, still preyed on them. But when they were close, she actually lost her hold on them. As they spent more time together, these followers would come to see Giggy as a friend. That feeling was not mutual, and their growing expectations of reciprocity from her would cause her to be nasty to them. She lost friends in dramatic and frequent fashion for a woman in her sixties. One manager she had appointed was the single mother of a teen girl my sister and I both made fast friends with. My grandmother’s quarreling with her friend was interfering with our ability to hand out, so we orchestrated reunions and reconciliations as often as we had to.
It helps a lot that other people call my grandmother a cult leader. That eliminates a lot of potential self-gaslighting, where I wonder if I’m not drawing connections that didn’t really exist or imagining sins she didn’t really have. I came to see her as a cult leader because I Googled her name (Carol Balizet) and the word “cult” and pages of results came up. Death and sadness and children removed by social services and mothers gone to jail or died in childbirth filled the sites. I stayed up that whole night, talking with my kindly weed dealer who came over with freebies to help me through the shock. I couldn’t go to sleep with such knowledge in my head.
I confronted her, once. She’d already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and moved into an elder home before I Googled her name, so I knew I didn’t have much time left for her to be lucid, for her to understand my questions and remember the events I was talking about. It took a lot of work, steering the conversation back to the topic, over and over, but I got there in the end. I asked her about her culpability in a particular child’s death that had hit me hard because I knew him. She spat back angrily, “Well what do you want me to say, I’m sorry?” That helped too. Painful and awful as it was, it let me let her go. It let me find her repulsive, and rebel.
Now it’s been eight, almost nine years since that troubling night online. I’ve had to come to terms with the parts of me that are influenced by her, for worse but also for better. I’ve had to integrate the monster and the mother-figure in my head together, the woman who loved me and the woman who didn’t care if she caused death. It’s not easy. Some days I don’t think of her, and those are easiest. Some days I think of her a lot, painfully, with nostalgia and longing. She’s still alive, in a high-care nursing home in the city I live in. In theory, I could go see her. But my feelings are such a mess. I don’t know if I’d hold onto her and cry, sobbing for my grandmother who I miss, or if I’d want to yell at the shell of a woman who can’t remember the sins I hate her for. I love her. I hate her. I miss her. Family is the strangest thing.
I say that my grandmother was a cult leader, and the picture people get in their minds doesn’t always fit the reality. Giggy controlled people mostly from a distance, through newsletters and books and presentations on casette tape, all of which they could buy, first by phone, later by website. She lived in Tampa, Florida the entire time the cult existed, but her followers mostly didn’t. They lived in Montana and Australia and on the other coast of Florida. She would go on “book tours”, staying in the homes of fans/followers and being a guest speaker at their churches. She sold most of her “non-fiction” cult literature on these trips, the grandest of which was a multi-week tour of Australia and New Zealand.
There were a few years when she sort of half-heartedly experimented with making a compound, I think. She lived in a nicer mobile home community, with a club house and playground and pool with lifeguard. She always paid her lot rent on time and in the early years she maintained a beautiful garden on her quarter-acre, greenbelt ajecent lot. The park owners liked her, and I think she found time to charm them on their visits to the property. She somehow got to pick who the park manager was for several years, appointing the job to friends of hers who would then move into the rent-free manager’s double-wide. Over this period of time, Giggy invited families of followers to sell their homes and land up north to come live in trailers near her. Five households came.
Cults can be extremely pro-government and nationalist. They can also be anti-government and downright seditious. Cults can be extremely religious, devoting hours upon hours to religious service and practice. They can be anti-religious and atheist in nature. They can be based on a common interest – any common interest. Cults have formed around the common interests of sports teams, horseback riding, Lord of the Rings, and hairdressing. Cults can have political goals. They can be conservative or liberal in stated beliefs. They can be outwardly antagonistic or seductively sweet. Cults can start as utopias, small groups with common ideals and a need to enforce group norms.
All will have an unreasonable burden of influence and control on their members. That control, not a group’s beliefs or membership or disconnection from reality, is what makes something a cult and not a club or church or community. International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA)’s author and psychologist Steve K. D. Eichel defines a cult as a “high demand organization”. There are many, subtly different definitions of cult in the field of study but this is the one I subscribe to. I think what makes a group a cult is not their beliefs but the level of burden the group is on its members.
Misandry Angie 