Category Archives: Random

The floss is willing

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Joey| 3 Comments

I’ve restarted another hobby, which is great because I need more things to spend time and money on. Okay, without the sarcasm this time, it is great, because I tried to restart it a year or two ago, and it didn’t quite catch. This time, it’s finally gotten me in its grasp. No, it’s not the gun thing; it’s cross-stitch.

I started up in high school, and never went beyond those really small, really easy kits. A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to take it up again, to have something to do while listening to podcasts or contemplating what to wear to the next Illuminati meet-and-greet. The only piece I completed at that time was this (NSFW language), which was a lot of fun to make. Then things rolled downhill for a while and I stopped right in the middle of a gift for my mother (NSFW), now complete. (What? I’m in the middle of this one [NSFW] for my dad. Where do you think I got my foul mouth in the first place?)

Now, however, I’ve got that stitching mojo. Even better, I have a bunch of supplies, and if there’s anything that motivates me, it’s organizing a whole bunch of art supplies. How I love art supplies. The problem is I can’t do anything with most of them. I’ve never been very good with the visual arts, except photography. Some people just can’t draw. No, really: I got a C+ in Intro to Drawing in high school.

But those jewel-colored, silky smooth skeins of embroidery floss now call to me with special meaning. “You can use us,” they purr. “You know what to do to us. And you know you want to do it.” I’ll admit to getting perhaps more than my share, but there’s just nothing like working a piece of floss all night long.

Oh baby, I'm gonna give you thread so good your eyes will pop.

Something I love about cross-stitching is that when I’m using someone else’s design, it’s a collaboration between me and the artist. That person designed the art in a way that I don’t have the skill to do, and then I bring it to fruition, either exactly as designed or with my own spin on it. Crossword puzzles have similarly been described as a contest between the writer and the solver…and it’s also been said that cross-stitching attracts people who like to do puzzles.

When I first relapsed into my cross-stitch habit, I thought it was a good activity for someone who’s in bed for a lot of the time. But I was dismayed at how much mental exertion it required, which for people with CFS can be just as or almost as exhausting as physical energy. I had to pay close attention, and it was tiring, and I wished I’d taken up knitting instead, so I could just stitch and stitch away while watching TV.

I thought this was a limitation, but I didn’t recognize it for what it was…just plain incompetence. Nota bene: this is a subtle yet important distinction, but extremely difficult to make except in hindsight. Starting all over again this time, I kept with the amusingly NSFW projects and found — no seriously, you’ll never guess. I found that the more I did it, the less difficult it became! What a concept!

So now I’m armed with an array of supplies in one hand, a long queue of upcoming projects in the other hand, and time on both of them, as well as a real desire to improve and learn more about the craft. You can always check out my Flickr photostream (NSF…oh you know by now) to see what other offensive or even benign goodies I’m working on.

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It doesn’t always get better

Posted on November 11, 2010 by Joey| 2 Comments

There has been a lot of attention paid lately to the problem of suicide among young gay people. Getting at-risk groups more help is an important and wonderful thing, and I hope the “It gets better” campaign succeeds in its goal. Today being Veterans Day, I wanted to discuss another group that has seen an alarming rise in suicides over the past few years: military personnel, past and present.

NPR reports:

There were 197 Army suicides in 2008, according to the Army’s numbers. The total includes active- and non-active-duty soldiers.

Last year, the number was 245. This year, through May, it’s already 163.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported on a Veterans Affairs (VA) study that discovered suicides among veterans aged 18 to 29 rose 26% from 2005 to 2007. And that number doesn’t include women veterans.

There are so many reasons for these suicides, from the difficulty in getting post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) recognized as an illness to the very culture of the military, which considers any form of weakness to be unacceptable. And if you’re soldiers in a situation where you have to rely on each other to survive, it’s understandable that you would want everyone around you to be strong, and to be strong for them. The problem is that the military creates soldiers to think like this, but provides little support once the soldier returns to civilian status, which often clashes with military training and thinking, even in mundane, everyday life.

On-duty soldiers considering suicide are lucky if they manage to get a sympathetic ear. My husband Paul, who was Army Airborne and a Special Forces selectee, told me about his time on a U.S. military base in Italy. There, anyone who had to be put on suicide watch was considered an annoyance at worst, and at best the target of derision and disgust. “Just do it already” was a common sentiment among the men who had to stand guard.

Salon.com has done an excellent job of reporting and analyzing on these problems. But as much as the military may improve its support, or even manage to foster a greater tolerance for PTSD and other service-related mental illnesses, there’s still public opinion. When Vietnam veterans returned home, in some cases they were met with hostility and insults like “baby killer!” by protesters who blamed the troops for their part in the war. Things have generally improved since then, but still, some people who are against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to blame the soldiers, this time with the added ammunition that “they all volunteered to go off to war.”

I worked at a suicide hotline in San Francisco, where I spoke with many veterans. Not everyone who called the line was in immediate danger of killing him- or herself; in fact only a small percentage of our calls were like that. Most of the veterans I spoke with were homeless, and I heard many stories of the dire straits that put them there (and many invectives hurled at the VA). I was good at talking to people without judging the reasons they were calling. And as I mentioned, my husband is a veteran, and of course I’m proud of him. Despite having seen some awful things, thankfully he returned without suffering from PTSD.

I was considering this fact when I was researching this post, and the thought crossed my mind that he had a lot of strength of character to go through his service and return mentally unharmed. Then I realized that the inverse of that belief is that people must be weak if they struggle with, or succumb to, PTSD or suicidal impulses. Do I really believe that? It’s the exact opposite of what I thought I believed, that given the horrors of war, it’s not a question of strength when soldiers return unable to shed those experiences. This is something I need to examine, and if a bleeding-heart commie pinko liberal like me thinks this way, I can only imagine that there must be many others who do as well, consciously or unconsciously.

Tonight, HBO is airing a new documentary chronicling the history of combat disorders from the Civil War until now. I think it’s a great thing to air on Veterans Day and I plan to watch it. Unfortunately, for so many veterans suffering from these disorders, it doesn’t get better. The promise of hope, if they even get that much, is an empty one.

If you have no veteran to hug today — and even if you do — you can help instead by donating to a charitable organization in support of these wounded warriors and their families. The Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, in addition to providing funds for families who have suffered military losses, has built a new facility specifically to study and aid patients with traumatic brain injury and PTSD. Another organization is the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, which among other things provides seminars about military suicide prevention, and support to the survivors.

I will be hugging my veteran tight today, and be grateful that he is whole without letting it be a judgment on anyone’s strength. And I will be thinking about those who haven’t been so lucky. They fought for us, and it’s only right that we should  fight for them.

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I love religion

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Joey| 2 Comments

I’ve enjoyed visiting other countries, and it’s inevitable that notable houses of worship are included on the sightseeing lists. Most of those visits took place when I was college age or a little older, and the idea that I was an atheist hadn’t crossed my mind at all, although I really was one even then.

I did feel distanced from the religious history of the buildings, because most of them were Christian or Catholic and I was just starting to get more connected to my own Jewish history. But that never stopped me from being awed by the sheer dedication and artistry that went into building these monuments. When I viewed the striped cathedral of Siena or admired the unique blue stained glass of Chartres cathedral, I thought about the people who created these things so long ago, and all the immense work it took for so many years.

In a way I took a humanistic view of the buildings, although that word wouldn’t have meant anything to me at the time. Of course, yes, they were inspired by the evil Catholic church or other corrupt, money-hungry sects of whatever. That fact remains. But even though the first U.S. transcontinental railroad was partly built by what amounted to Chinese slave labor, can’t we still admire the feat?

Without religion, the requiems by Mozart, Brahms, Fauré, Verdi, and others wouldn’t exist. (Actually quite a lot of music wouldn’t exist; I’m just picking out a few.) Imagine the elimination of nearly all music from Gregorian chants to the Baroque era. Both religious patronage and inspiration helped to create that music, but I can’t imagine a world without it. In high school, I sang in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Christmas cantata Hodie, and the fact that it’s about the birth of Christ didn’t do a thing to dent the pure, amazing joy of singing that music in a beautiful hall with a full choir and orchestra.

And then there’s the enormous, secular body of literature, theatre, and film based on stories from religious texts. Okay, the world could probably live without Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, but supernatural Greek and Biblical myths alone are the basis for more of our libraries than I’d want to see disappear.

When I saw the Book of Kells, there was nothing religious to me about it. It was impossible to read, but that didn’t stop me from admiring the beautiful illumination by talented scribes. They may have been inspired by Jesus but I didn’t have to see it in that context: it was a work of art. The same went for the poster of Dali’s Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) that I hung in my apartment during college. There are many things that made me love that painting, perhaps more on the Corpus Hypercubus side than the Crucifixion side. It didn’t feel like I was putting a cross in my room; it was a work of art that moved and intrigued me.

I am not arguing against a secular society. Believe me. I hope one day there’s a place where religion plays no part at all, and science and discovery are worshiped and showered with money instead. I also think religion is generally an outdated and irrelevant system, and I’m not arguing for its promotion in the name of art.

What I’m responding to is when I hear people expressing disgust at the opulence of ancient churches or distaste for any music that has any relationship to God. To each his own. But there’s a further assertion that the world would be so much better if all that time, money, energy, and inspiration went into advancing science and knowledge instead.

That may well be true. But if we really are part of a multiverse, then there’s a version of our world where that did happen. There’s also a version where the U.S. and the Soviet Union destroyed the planet, and one where a space probe comes back infested with a hyper-intelligent sort of jam creature that goes on to form a coalition government with Madagascar.

So speculation doesn’t matter. The past is the past and this is our world. Religion has been the driving force behind shaping so much of our culture, it seems like a losing battle to ignore our history instead of at least studying it, if not embracing it. I don’t personally see the point in rejecting the masterpieces that religion inspired, and that can inspire us no matter what our own views are. I can’t agree with people who assert that religion has never brought any good to the world. Stick with your secular art on principle if that’s important to you — your choice doesn’t affect me, of course — but I can safely say I do love religion for bringing all these things into the world.

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