There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

-Norman Mailer, Armies Of The Night

People frequently comment on the emptiness in one night stands, but emptiness here has always been just another word for darkness. Blind encounters writing sonnets no one can ever read. Desire and pain communicated in the vague language of sex.

None of which made sense to me until much later when I realized everything I thought I’d retained of my encounters added up to so very little, hardly enduring, just shadows of love outlining nothing at all.

Who has never killed an our? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating that something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.

Quel’ che tu si i’ sev’, qul’ che i’ son’ a’devand’.
(What you are I was, what I am you will be.)
-Neapolitan Proverb

House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski

I’ve known people with fairly ambiguous or even ambivalent gender identities who have decided to carry their child for various reasons, but this is the first I’ve heard of someone who is clearly male identified doing this.

I must say, the image accompanying the story creates a pretty strong reaction of interest and maybe even perplexity in me. I think it really highlights just how amazing the spectrum of gender identities is.

I wish I had something more insightful to add. This will, of course, further increase the hits I get to this blog as a search result for “transexuals”. I have a feeling those people aren’t finding quite what they’re looking for here.

I watched this video yesterday and found it to be incredibly powerful. I think it’s actually the first youtube video that made me really think.

Essentially, it’s a video produced by an autistic woman who explains how her physical actions are her own form of communicating with the objects around her. She then goes on to question how society in general can consider her “non-communicative” just because she doesn’t communicate in “their” language. In an interesting example of ethnocentrism, we consider only our own verbal communication to be valid, and anyone who can’t or won’t learn our language is considered to be less than human.

She raises very interesting points about personhood and intelligent thought, as well as our system for valuing other people. It’s definitely something I feel like I should consider next time I interact with a person with different cognitive abilities.