Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

I knew it was going to happen sooner rather than later, but I'm still sad about it: the real Sister Wendy has died at 88, says the BBC.

You might wonder why a transgender lesbian with... certain unusual tastes would pay homage to a Roman Catholic nun. If you do, you must never have seen any of her ten-minute shorts about art history, which are the start of her claim to fame. She usually had something deeply insightful and occasionally even feminist to say about the art.

I'm not proud to say that I made fun of how she looked and sounded at Trouble's Halloween party in 1999, which is why T assigned me the username "sistawendy" on her MOO, DownMOO. It does, however say something very good about Britain that the BBC would let somebody who looked and sounded so unintentionally hilarious in front of a camera. I wish the US were more like that.

And another thing: I once watched an interview with her. Despite the perception that I'd formed of her as an unconventional, funky old lady, she was the most articulate spokesperson for the Catholic church that I've ever heard, even to this day. She was a nun all the way. Yes, even with today's "cool" Pope the Catholic church is nastily transphobic and much else that is wrong, but I had to admire Sister Wendy's capability and dedication, however misdirected I might judge it.

After 16 years and over three thousand entries, I have deleted my LiveJournal. I didn't, however, delete comments that I made because really, even if Putin's goons object - and they theoretically could object to plenty of them - what are they gonna do? I thought maybe somebody might want the comments, especially if they migrate.

I still have (a few) mixed feelings about abandoning a service that has, in the past, been a platform for Russian dissidents. LJ's management has, however, acquiesced to Putin's demands for one reason or another. The possibility of ending up dissolved in acid is an all-too-real reason that they might have considered.

Upsides? All other things being equal, my "reading page" should load faster because it doesn't contain a bunch of inactive users.

LJ is dead, but the dream lives on at Dreamwidth. Let's queer this joint up!

I've gone through my LJ friends list, selected a dozen or so whose Dreamwidth accounts I'm still not connected to, and pinged them about it. The objective here is to migrate my reading from LJ to DW, not just posting, so I can nuke this here LJ.

Yeah, the vast majority on my friends list have long since gone inactive and that's sad, but on the other hand, that make it easier for me to migrate.

Fuck Russia.

Cleaned my lake place yesterday. I haven't exactly been up to keeping up with the housework much lately.

German beer, Depeche Mode, and cupcake_goth at El Norte: a damn fine plan. Quote of the decade from her: "There's no good way out of this." Any sleep deficit today was the result of staying up too late having fun, which is a normal state of affairs for me. How weird when I was waiting for the bus there that I saw some possibly homeless guy walking up Aurora, and I thought to myself, 'Oh, thank God you're Mexican!'

Had a rare and most welcome chat with rigel_p this afternoon. She's doing pretty well, all things considered. As a student of martial arts, she had a couple of things to say about my carrying around a knife or pepper spray: don't, unless you've had training with them. I looked into Model Mugging classes at her suggestion, but they seem to be infrequent and not cheap. She also mentioned Bujinkan, but she's not enamored of the Seattle-area dojos; I didn't ask her why. This is where I'd love to hear from thewronghands.

If I don't reduce my Twitter and Facebook consumption, I'll never get enough sleep again. It occurs to me that LJ may become once again my main social media outlet. I'll just have to find something else to do while I'm dilating.

One final more thing: I've got no strong opinion on the safety pin question, but if you see some goon hassling somebody on Trump's target list, intervene. Call them out. And be ready for stuff to get ugly, because it might. That goes double if you yourself are not on the target list.

I'm guessing that you guys have probably heard of Ello, a new social networking site. (Yes, yet another one.) What I like about this one, though, is that its business model is more akin to LJ's than Facebook's or Twitter's, i.e. you're the customer and not the product. Ello is also pretty well designed, even if it is in beta. I've posted all of one entry. If you want an invitation, hit me up. It's pretty quiet over there so far.

You may ask, at least if you're me, "Why can't LJ be again what it once was?" I'd love to think that it can be, but I think LJ's management let its interface languish for too long, and now it's acquired a patina of age that will prove impossible to scrub away on the internet. nerds_eye_view describes LJ as "retro".

Remember a couple of entries ago, when I expressed shock and dismay at being called my son's dad in public? I cross-posted it to Zuckerberg's data mine. Drama ensued. Once again, it was an unpleasant surprise. I mean, it's wonderful that plenty of my friends have my back, but it's less than wonderful that some of them now aren't speaking to each other. And some of the 'splaining that went on was kind of like watching the fireball from a derailed fuel train: hypnotic and voluminous, but messy and tragic.

Resolved: I'm not going to censor myself over this or anything like it in the future. And you know things like this are going to keep on happening for the rest of my life.

It's yet another hard lesson in what people around me are really made of, but no one gets to tell me how to feel or what to write about any of this.

I tend not to have anything much to post on Wednesdays & Thursdays because Tuesday & Wednesday nights I usually spend picking up my son from his after school activities. Next week, however, will be a bit unusual: my son has Confirmation this coming Tuesday. (Reform Jews do that. Reg'lar Jews don't.)

I'm ambivalent about it. On the one hand, I'm Really Not Religious.* On the other, hey, he completed something and maybe even learned some social skills and made some more-or-less friends.



*No need to friends-lock this. He's straight up asked me if I believe in God, and I told him I didn't. I believe in not lying to my son.

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I went to another little Goddess Night tonight for an hour or so, had a lovely night, and was reminded of the Lick monthly at Chop Suey. Yes, another lesbian club night, less Orthodox Lesbian than Hot Flash. I'd like to check it out if I can, and I'll be thrilled if any of you queerbos want to join me.

Pics from New Mexico, uploaded in record time. I must say, the new LJ interface is an improvement. Most of the pics are from a day hike at a place called Tsankawi, which is a pueblo on a mesa founded about a thousand years ago and abandoned around the time the Spanish arrived.

I just changed the "glbt" tag on all of my entries that have it to "queer". Every time I looked at the old tag it reminded me of the contention over which letter comes first.

Which reminds me: this isn't the first time I've wanted to change a tag on a whole bunch of entries - I've misspelled some in the past. Does anyone out there on the lazyweb know a good way to do bulk tag edits?

But first: people have talked smack about LJ for being too "mercenary", but the recent DOS attack on LJ from Russian goons seems evidence to some that they're the biggest and best - perhaps only - independent media voice in Russia. I'm OK throwing money at a company like that, as long as I get something for it.

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The following happened Wednesday night:

INT. NIBS' HOUSE, DINNER TIME. SISTAWENDY and her son THE WENDLING are just sitting down when the PHONE RINGS.

SISTAWENDY
TO THE WENDLING
Don't get that.

SISTAWENDY gets up and checks the CALLER ID ON THE PHONE. It's a 425 NUMBER but there's NO NAME. She answers the PHONE.

SISTAWENDY
Hello?

CALLER
Hello. May I speak to Nibs?

SISTAWENDY
She isn't here right now. May I take a message?

CALLER
Yeah. This is Allan.

SISTAWENDY
Allan who?

CALLER
None of your business. Who are you?

SISTAWENDY
BELLY LAUGHS
I'm married to her. Goodbye!

SISTAWENDY hangs up.

Nibs told me later that night that may have been a man she was trying to date. Oops!