This column is why I think Dan Savage is a verbally abusive asshole who shouldn't be allowed to write the warning label on store-brand toothpaste bottles, let alone a widely syndicated advice column. The guy is a bag of stank-ass shit. End of fucking story.

NOTE TO ALL: Yes, I am back on with the Sims thing again. I don't have Sims 3 yet, though I probably will do at some point over the summer. In the meantime I shall update on Sims 2. Enjoy! Unless you don't. In which case -- Ignore! OK, right then.

Goodness, my adherence to canon in refusing to put a fire alarm in my Songcatcher Sims' household just got Janet McTeer killed. Poor Tom; they were actually in the process of getting married when the fire broke out. And because I was watching the wedding, I missed the whole fire until it had spread beyond the point where it could be put out. I'm not really sure why Lily was the one stupid enough to jump around directly within the flames, since she had more logic points than anyone but Harriet, but perhaps Sims logic does not correspond to human logic. Either way it is an unfortunate turn of events, as Tom seems to have gone crackers and has been cradling and singing to a flour sack for days under the impression that it is a child. Indeed, everyone's aspiration meters are as far red as they go -- except for Harriet, who apparently doesn't care. She is immersed in hunting bugs. ::shrug:: Whatever floats your boat.

So anyway, how do I Resurrect Lily Penleric? Tom and Deladis are both insisting that I do this, but the only option that comes up when I click her urn is "Mourn". And would resurrecting her turn her into a zombie? Because they are both afraid of her turning into a zombie. Not that I can't see their point. I have to admit I'm kind of curious as to how that would go, but I'm not sure I want to send a six-foot-one Janet McTeer zombie loose on their household just to satisfy my curiosity. She's formidable enough as a human being.

Oh, the other awesome thing is that Deladis is terrified of smashing Lily's urn, which is lovely and sentimental, except for the part where she then started a full-on knock-down drag-out with Polly right on top of the urn. Dude, I know you guys are love rivals or whatever, but could you maybe fight anywhere but on top of the urn? However, it did not break. I am wondering how you *can* break an urn, if having a giant rolling-around-on-the-ground fistfight directly atop it won't do it.

This is the first time one of my Sims has ever died, except when Mrs. Tottendale died in a different fire, but back then I was a wimp and canceled out the game so it wouldn't save and she could be alive again. I am very curious to see how this plays out.

Oh Sims. How do you be so addictive?

I do not like Fiddler on the Roof.

Hey, everyone, it is my λ’s birthday and she is amazing! She is 28 today, and the prime factors of that (λ loves prime factors) are 7 and 2, which I’m pretty sure means that she is going to live for 72 more years, meaning she will top out at 100 years old, which is just a fantastic thing for the whole universe, so everyone applaud now. Also, wish a happy birthday to halfacricket! and I will pass the birthday wishes along to her. Or she can just check the comments.

We are currently accepting HTML, Rich Text (whatever the hell that is, but LJ gives me the option every day), e-mails, e-cards, lolcats, extraordinarily large sums of money, and birthday cakes thrown at Ann Coulter. Right now we have no good method for accepting extraordinarily large sums of money because our PayPal is ded, but if you want to send one I guarantee you we will help you find a way. Also, if you manage to throw a birthday cake at Ann Coulter, we will pay you the extraordinarily large sums of money. Just make sure the cake says “Happy Birthday λ” very clearly on the front in frosting, so that just before it hits her face she will see it and understand that it does not represent a well-intentioned, if oddly delivered, birthday wish for Ann herself.

...Happy birthday λ! Oh my wife is so great.

When I was a kid, I read an article in Highlights magazine that gave excellent instructions on how to pour out a bottle of water. It explained that if you upended the bottle and then swirled it around clockwise, the water would form a whirlpool at the mouth of the bottle, and it would all flow out much faster! Highlights helpfully suggested that you challenge your friends to a bottle-pouring-out contest, so you could make them feel like morons for not being able to empty a bottle as fast as you. Good times!

Not having any friends as a kid, I challenged my mom to a bottle-pouring-out contest instead. You can imagine the way my world tilted on its axis when I swirled my bottle around just the way Highlights had instructed, and the water DID go out faster -- but my mother still beat me! Because she *squeezed* her bottle! At first I accused her of cheating. Then, when I realized that if my mother was cheating in bottle-pouring-out contests there truly could be no rationality in the universe whatsoever, I said that it must have been a “mistake”. Physics made a mistake that day, my friends. Highlights magazine said so.

Cut to twenty years later. I am emptying out the remainder of a bottle of horrid Aquafina FlavorSplash (Raspberry! With Other Natural Flavors) in the bathroom sink here so I can refill it with normal water that has not been splashed with flavor.* Since the bottle itself has been tainted by pallid ghosts of raspberries long since passed, this requires me to refill and empty the bottle several times by way of exorcism.

And so the bottle goes swirl swirl swirl, and the whirlpool forms at the mouth, and out the water goes in a shining circular arc. And then I refill it, and swirl swirl swirl again, and watch in dumb 9 am stupefaction as the water pours out in another shining arc. And I’m three shining arcs in before I remember that physics didn’t actually break that day that my mother and I competed to empty a bottle the fastest. And that, therefore, I should be squeezing my bottle.

And I tried that for two seconds. And my hand resisted. It did not want to squeeze the bottle. Somewhere in the back of my head a little voice was wailing plaintively “yeah but Highlights SAID!”

So I gave in to the inevitable and went back to swirling the bottle again. I lost about thirty seconds of my life. But the little person with the little voice was happy.

I guess you never quite recover from a Highlights childhood.

____________________________________________________

*I got this affront to drinkable liquids everywhere when I was in a Dunkin Donuts and I wanted to get a Diet Coke, but they were a Pepsi place, so I asked for a Diet Pepsi, but they didn’t have Diet Pepsi, so I looked at what sodas they did have and it was Sierra Mist and three flavors of Crush, so then I went to get a water and they had five rows of Aquafina FlavorSplash Raspberry! water and no normal water.¹ WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TO ME, DUNKIN DONUTS.

¹In answer to your inevitable question, I needed to be able to carry the water in my purse, so I couldn’t get it in a cup. Besides, Dunkin Donuts now charges for water in a cup. They put ice in it and call it a Blizzard Blast or something like that. I guess giving it a brand name justifies charging fifty cents for tap water.

I think I’m going to print off a bunch of copies of this article, or the relevant statistics therein, to hand out to the MASSPIRG folks and all those other path-blocking guilt-tripping people with the wide eyes and ingenuous smiles that I meet on the sidewalks like every damn day in spring and summer. I kind of don’t even want to admit how loony those people drive me. This is, of course, because I am ludicrously susceptible to guilt trips. If I can’t spare a moment for the environment, I must be a terrible person who bears the entire weight of global warming on her shoulders! So my thought process runs.

So yeah. I am happy to have documentation that justifies my seething, poorly suppressed loathing of those clipboard-bearing Stepford coeds. I seriously am going to make little statistics-laden flyers and, when confronted with a chirpy little voice asking me if I can spare just a minute to save AIDS-afflicted polar bears from illiteracy in the rainforests, I am going to smile brightly and say “Sorry! I can’t. Here’s why.” And then I am going to shove my own pamphlet at them, and watch as their lacquered happyfaces become interestingly distorted in their confusion. And I will be happy.

Thanks, Slate! About 75% of your other articles from today pissed me off, but this one is A+!

Also, givesmevoice has posted her Unconventionally Attractive Poll: Redux, and everyone should totally vote in it because looking at pictures of pretty people and voting for your favorites is fun! And Erin is looking for a diverse group of people with diverse perspectives to vote, and that means you all. BUT DO NOT VOTE UNTIL YOU HAVE READ THIS: Jane Adams is missing from the poll! LJ mucked something up or something, and she is just an empty box, three squares below Hugh Laurie and one above Jane White, who if you don't know who she is by now YOU SHOULD. Anyway. Jane Adams is the person in my icon and I love her dearly, so now you know what she looks like and you can tick the empty box to vote for her if you want to. And, with that said -- go vote! :D

As everyone in the world has noted, Michael Jackson has died.

I am surprised that I am quite sad about this.

I've always been more sympathetic to Michael Jackson than many. Unlike most, I'm not convinced that he was sexually abusing children; I honestly think he may have just been so troubled that he cathected to children and slept with them (literally) in an attempt to regress to childhood himself. There's no way to know and I don't want to speculate on it any further. But I know that whatever else he was, he was an abused child and a deeply troubled adult. And the fact that he was an incredibly talented artist doesn't seem to have done much to mitigate what was, honestly, a pretty tragic life in many ways.

I am sorry that he was so troubled and I'm sorry that he's dead. I'm sorry for his family and for the friends who loved him. And -- I'm borrowing this caution from distaff_exile, but I mean it just as much as she did -- I will not be happy at all if I see people cracking wise at his expense. I know making fun of Michael Jackson, in death or in life, is like shooting fish in a barrel, and I don't care. Keep it off my journal.

On Michael Jackson is a book about both Michael Jackson and about what he's meant in our society. I found it insightful and enjoyable. Unfortunately the entire Internet has descended on Amazon to buy up all the books about Michael Jackson it can get its hands on, and as a result there are only two copies of that one left in stock. I am assuming they will be doing a very fast new printing. (I could probably sell my copy pretty high right now, actually, if I cared to.) I am not sure how Margo Jefferson feels about Michael Jackson's death, but I am pretty sure it is giving her a substantial boost in income.

It's a strange situation all around.

Psst...

Hey! Now you all know my real name.

XD

Question for the day:

What, precisely, is in a Butterfinger?

I know about butterscotch and I know about toffee. I know about malt and I know about peanut brittle. I know about rice crisps and I know about caramel and I know about nougat and I know about coconut and I know about nuts and I know about just about every damn thing you can put in a candy bar, but I do not know about the stuff that is in Butterfingers.

What is that stuff? And why do I want to eat it RIGHT NOW?

The universe, it is full of questions!

I didn't realize how much of a grudge I held against the 1-800-SUICIDE hotline until this "1,000 RTs for $1,000!" thing started on Twitter. I mean, it makes sense, right? Suicide prevention's an important issue, I'll be the first to tell you that. But 1-800-SUICIDE... well, I first got a little squidgy about them several years back (2005ish? I 'unno) when they went from being privately funded to being funded and essentially run by the Bush administration -- as I understand it, a government agency was now staffing and training the hotline counselors. I didn't, and don't, really know how to process that -- I have no idea if the dangers were exaggerated or what. I know they were logging/keeping records of the people who called, which is of course a concern as far as confidentiality goes (there had also been concern that frequent callers would find it more difficult to get life insurance, but I don't know how likely that is, and as far as I know all it ever was was speculation.)

What I do know firsthand is that one night I myself called them in crisis. I should note that ever since one very bad night in college when I poured a bottle of pills into my hand and then knew I couldn't take them, I've known suicide isn't an option for me. It just isn't. There's something in me that wants to fight and wants to live -- probably because all my demons are in my head, and there are so many people in my life who love me and will help me fight. I have had tremendous luck in being born into the family I was. Anyway, the point is, I can't commit suicide. I know this. I flirted with the idea for years until I hit that point where it was "you either take these pills or you flush them, and decision time is right now." And I flushed them. And whenever I start to feel that suicide would be a good idea, I think back to that moment, and I know it isn't for me.

But the fact that suicide isn't for me doesn't always make things feel *better*. Actually, a lot of times, it makes it feel worse in that particular moment. Because that way, I have no out. A friend of mine recently referred to suicide as an "emergency exit"; it's a scary idea and I wish it didn't feel that way to anyone and I don't want anyone in this world to ever take it. But I know that feeling. And I know that while I used to feel like I had an emergency exit, I know now that it isn't true. And if I'm trapped in a room and the walls are closing in and they get tighter and tighter until they're pressing in on me on all sides and my chest can barely expand and I'm gasping and I can't see how I could push them away -- I can't even trick myself into believing there's a way out. All I know is I have to get through to tomorrow, and there are times when I have absolutely no idea -- I mean, no idea at all how I'm going to do that. My brain stops working right. ( maybe triggery ) I start thinking I don't even know what. None of it makes any sense. I'm alone in my head and it's this alien landscape and I can't get out of it and it's just damn scary.

So one night I called 1-800-SUICIDE because I didn't know where else to call. My thoughts, such as they were, were that, okay, I wasn't actively suicidal, but everything was *so* wrong in my head and I knew I was a danger to myself even if I wasn't going to actually kill myself. A self-injuring mindset is a bad place to be in. A mindset that's almost, but not quite, mildly psychotic is a bad place to be in. I knew just enough to know that, knew just enough to know that a bunch of tiny cuts or a bloody bald head weren't the answers. So I called the suicide hotline. I may not have conveyed it properly in this entry, but the state I was in was my bipolar version of severe depression -- for me it bottoms out in, well, this kind of shit. And I desperately wanted someone I could talk to, someone who would make me feel less alone, someone who would reassure me that it would be okay, that this was all in my head, who would talk me through what sorts of things might make me feel better. I thought if they had tactics to talk someone down from suicide those same tactics might work to get me off the brink of whatever this was. And I thought that even if that wasn't an option, there would at least be a voice on the other end of the line, someone to care about what was happening to me.

And so I called. And this is the conversation that we had.

KYLIE: [troubled, withdrawn, and not articulating very well] Hi, I... was hoping you could help me... I -- I'm feeling depressed, and I thought... is this, like, somewhere I can call to talk to somebody?
HOTLINE LADY: [with a trace of impatience] Are you feeling suicidal?
KYLIE: I... no, I don't think -- I mean, not exactly. I'm bipolar and it's... a bad night and I... no, I'm not suicidal, because I know I couldn't do that, but I feel like... I mean, it's a bad night.
HOTLINE LADY: This is a suicide hotline.
KYLIE: So... I can't talk to someone there? This isn't somewhere I can call?
HOTLINE LADY: [more impatiently than before] It's a suicide hotline. You're not suicidal?
KYLIE: ...no. I guess.
HOTLINE LADY: Then I can't help you.
KYLIE: Is there... I mean, like, somewhere else where I could call? Where they could help me?
HOTLINE LADY: Not that I know of.
KYLIE: ...okay. So I guess I should go?
HOTLINE LADY: All right.
KYLIE: Um... thanks...
HOTLINE LADY: You're welcome. ::click::

And I do know it's a suicide hotline. And I know the techniques they are trained in are probably meant to bring people off the brink of suicide.

But I also know this. Not everyone who is suicidal is able to articulate those words. Just calling a hotline called 1-800-SUICIDE ought to be a tip-off that the caller is not doing well and is probably latently, if not overtly, suicidal. (Years after I made my "to swallow or to flush" decision, a psych evaluation showed that I had "significant latent suicidal ideology" and that I needed to be carefully monitored to make sure that didn't become overt.) Hotline staffers should be trained to deal with the fact that some of their callers *will* be in a "I mean, I could never actually do it, but..." state, and they should be trained to ask what's after the but, what's underneath the ellipsis. And even if they can't help the person who's calling -- they may not be trained to deal with psychotic states, for example, although I believe that they should be -- they need to show some kindness. Not impatience. Not "I can't help you" with an undernote of "why did you call 1-800-SUICIDE if you're not suicidal?" and an even stronger undernote of "get off the phone." I heard *no* kindness in that woman's voice at all, and I needed to hear a kind voice so badly that I would have taken anything I could get. There was nothing *to* get. Just impatience, and a distinct impression that if I didn't know that 1-800-SUICIDE was strictly for suicidal people, I was kind of dumb.

Maybe 1-800-SUICIDE is a good hotline for bringing overtly suicidal people -- the people who can say "I am seriously considering slitting my wrists/swallowing these pills/using this gun/whatever" -- off the brink. And that's a good thing. That's a great thing. But what is so scary is feeling like if you don't have those pills held up to your mouth, there's no net to catch you if you fall. There's no one you can call at 3 in the morning who will speak to you kindly and help you through this.* And it's especially awful when you call the only hotline you know of and they tell you you're not worth their talking to. That what you're going through doesn't matter because it doesn't involve an immediate threat to your life.

Whenever you hear statistics about depression and such, what you hear most is "Depression kills x number of people each year." Through suicide. And most of the efforts to work with depression are aimed at suicide prevention. Which is huge. Crucial. Immediate. Of paramount importance. I could give more adjectives, but you get the point.

But what those stats ignore are the people living in misery every single day. We fall off the radar. Hospitalization programs are designed for people who are suicidal; suicidality is the magic key that unlocks the door of the ward.** A good therapist or prescriber will worry about severe depression even if there's no suicidal ideology, but a bad one -- and I can vouch for this personally -- will not devote a whole lot of energy to ameliorating that. I had a therapist once -- saw him for a year, actually, because I didn't know any better options were available to me -- who literally did not care if I was barely able to get out of bed, so long as I wasn't going to kill myself and I wasn't going to go manic.

I'm not severely depressed today. But what that woman on 1-800-SUICIDE taught me was that if I was ever going to get out of those super-depressed states, I was going to have to fight my own goddamn way out, hanging to the cliff face by my fingernails and listening to them rip one by one and praying I'd find some sort of a foothold before the last bloody nail pulled off. When I posted the other day about how when my brain starts to go quasi-psychotic, I take a quarter dose of antipsychotic and then watch the Golden Girls? No one ever taught me that. No one ever even taught me what dosage of meds would be appropriate in that situation. No one ever taught me strategies to get out of that scary place. I had to go through trial and error a million times before I learned the sort of music that will bring me out of a specific headspace, the difference between that and the headspace in which coloring is the most helpful thing for me, and the difference between both of those states and the state in which Seroquel and the Golden Girls are best. I did it all on my fucking own. And I'm proud of that, and I resent that, too. For about four or five years, starting a year or two after my diagnosis, I had a good therapist who helped me through the worst of things, and she's the reason I was able to carry on for myself after a point. But things with her collapsed, as things are wont to do. And now this fight seems to be mine and mine alone.

And that's fine. You know, it's fine. Whatever. I'll handle it. I do handle it. I'll keep handling it.

But in retrospect, I am so, so angry at that woman from 1-800-SUICIDE who told me that since I wasn't suicidal, my problems didn't matter, and she couldn't help me. I am so, so angry that she wouldn't show me some kindness. I am so, so angry that she didn't care.

Maybe she was just one bad hotline staffer. Maybe the rest are better. Maybe the issues surrounding the Bush administration's takeover of the hotline and the confidentiality issues and all that don't amount to much.

But goddammit, that was a bad night, and it got worse after I called that woman. And I didn't know how much that bitterness was still a part of me -- how little I'd forgiven, much less forgotten -- until I saw so many RTs on Twitter asking for funding for that hotline. If I'd never called them, I'd have RTed it myself. Actually, I did RT it myself when I first saw it, because promoting suicide awareness when I can is such a reflexive thing for me, before I stopped to think for a second. I deleted the RT after thinking about it. And now I can't stop thinking about it.

I just wish that things could be different. I wish the most well-known mental health hotline in the country weren't one that only helps actively suicidal people. I wish there were a 24-hour mental health hotline available to everyone who feels they can't survive the night. Because there isn't. I've looked. When last I checked, anyway, the only general-mental-health hotline available was open 9-5. Who in the hell needs that sort of hotline 9-5? Night is the bad time. Night is statistically the most likely time for decompensation. During the day we can call our therapists and expect a call back at ten of the hour. During the day there's a world out there that is still alive and waking and available to help us. During the night, we are alone.

And there's no one for us to call. Hence, The Golden Girls.

::sigh:: I don't even know where exactly this rant is coming from. I've been writing so much about mental illness lately, after a period of writing so little about it for so long. I don't know why I'm suddenly feeling compelled to share. To break my own self-imposed silence.

I don't have a good way to end this post.


*Calling family and/or friends is completely different and not what I, at least, wanted in that moment. They're too emotionally invested. They can't be objective and caring at the same time.
**Not that a psych ward is necessarily a great time, but around-the-clock care and constant monitoring of medication/adjustment of meds as appropriate is a very important resource.

"I'm dead! I'm dead!"

The words came from a grizzled old man in a tan baseball cap, hollering at people through a few crooked yellow teeth. It was a beautiful day out, and I'd gone for a walk on the Commons on my lunch break. The grass was full of people lounging with sunglasses on and backpacks under their heads, or with kids and toys spread around them on blankets; the fountains were on in the Frog Pond, and children leapt through the water.

Until I came across the man I had been thinking how nice it was to be out on a day like this, the weather making everyone a little happier, the people around me getting the same lift I was from the sun and the breeze and the pretty surroundings. I heard the man yelling and my thoughts froze up a little bit, but my feet kept walking. Near me a child asked her mother, "Why is that man yelling?" The mother said comfortingly, "It's all right. He's just talking out loud."

"I'm dead! I'm dead!"

I was maybe twenty feet past him when I stopped, my back to him. The words he was shouting pulled me into a place I didn't want to be in, a dark place with rough walls where the air was dirty and got clogged in your lungs. I stopped because I'd been there before. Oh, I've never been dead. But I know what it is to feel that way. I knew he was shouting at the world that so much of what lived inside him had died that it didn't matter anymore that his body hadn't caught up.

I'm bipolar -- bipolar I, with psychotic features. I don't know if all my readers know that. If you don't you should know it now. I'm crazy, and so was the guy in the park. So I stopped, and looked the other way, and waited to see what I was going to do.

I must have stood there for five minutes, with his shouts of "I'm dead!" ringing out behind me every ten seconds or so. I had been planning on doubling around the park and stopping at McDonald's for a package of apple slices to go with my lunch. I felt in my pocket; one bill. Didn't matter what it was. I couldn't give it to him and still get my apples. And besides, giving him money wouldn't help. He needed a soup kitchen, a place to stay, a hospital. Something.

I looked around. None of those things were around.

I thought about it. If I gave him the money and gave him directions for how to get to a hospital on the T, would he go? Check into the psych ward through the ER? Not likely.

What if I walked him with me to the McDonald's, bought him something to eat? But I couldn't stay with him -- I had to get back to work, and I'd seen too recently what happens to crazy people in reputable establishments.

Part of me -- a big part of me -- wanted to go back and talk to him. And another part of me -- another big part of me -- wanted to walk away. λ's and my financial situation is tight right now; we have to be watching every dollar we spend, and the money in my pocket wasn't mine alone to give. And the guy was scary. He was crazy. He was sitting on a bench shouting at people and he could lash out if I approached him. As I thought about it, I heard him yell the word "Faggot!" I thought it was "I'm a faggot!", actually, but I couldn't be sure. Another time I thought I might have heard "Cunt!", but again, I couldn't be sure. The only words that were coming out clear were the ones he kept repeating: "I'm dead!"

And somehow I turned around and started walking back. Scared, feeling stupid, but feeling impelled. Something about the words touched me in a way I couldn't even fully explain, and still can't. He was dead. He wanted the world to know he was dead. He was breathing, and he was dead. I needed him to come out of that space in his head. I needed him to know he wasn't dead. I needed him to be better.

So I walked up to him. Very cautiously. I said, "Hey, guy, what's going on?"

His face took on a look of alarm. "Hey, no, I'm not --" he said, garbling the words. He thought I was somebody in authority, come to tell him to move along. So much for my being afraid of him -- he was afraid of me, and, I realized, probably with better reason than I had.

"No, it's okay, it's okay," I said, as reassuringly as I could. "I just wanted to ask what's going on."

He stopped shouting immediately. Tilted his head toward me. His whole expression changed. In one second he'd gone from angry and raving to polite and open, putting social manners on as you might adjust your jacket and straighten your tie.

"I'm Joe Haskins,"* he said to me. His speech was twisted and slurred, but there was no smell of alcohol off him, no bottles around him. Whatever was wrong with his speech was part of what was wrong with him. I didn't, and don't, think he was drunk.

"Hi," I said.

"I need you to know something," he told me.

"What's that?" I asked.

He pondered for a long moment. "I'm Joe Haskins," he said.

"Hi," I said again. Then, "It seems like you're having a bad day."

"You know what, little lady?" he said.

"What's that?"

"I need to tell you something. I really need you to know this."

"Okay."

"You are..." He paused, thinking about it. "You're my brother. My sister," he added. Still caught on "brother," I didn't respond. "And let me tell you something else. I'd kill for you."

Um, okay. "No, it's okay. I'm glad to meet you." I started to say, "I don't want you to kill anybody for me," but stopped myself. He was not going to kill anybody for me; that wasn't the situation, it had nothing to do with what was going on. I didn't feel like letting him know that my first impulse had been "oh, God, please don't act homicidal."

"I'd..." He lost track of his thoughts again. "I'm Joe Haskins. And you... let me tell you, little sister..."

"What's that?"

I couldn't understand his reply.

"Hey," I said, "I'd like you to feel better today. Can --"

He was already shaking his head vehemently. "No, no, no," he said, angry and sad. "No, no."

"No? That's not going to happen, huh?"

"No, no, no."

"I'll pray for you," I said, not that sure why, except that a lot of the homeless people I see seem to find solace in religious paraphernalia.

He shook his head again, as firmly as before. "No."

I went back to my original plan. "Is there someplace you can go?" I asked. "Someplace you can stay?"

He smiled at me, big. "I own this spot."

"Okay." I had no idea how the lives of the homeless worked, especially not in Boston Common, where their presence seems to be tolerated as a simple fact, as just part of the way things are in the city. I was gathering myself up to ask if he'd ever been to a hospital, and, if so, if he wanted to go, when another guy walked up and gave Joe a half-smoked cigarette. "Hey, Joe, how's it going?" he said.

I turned to the guy. "You know him?" I said.

"I'm his brother," the other guy told me.

"Oh, good," I said, immensely relieved. "Look, is he okay? Is he --"

"Well, not like that, but you know. We're brothers out here."

"Oh," I said, getting it. "You two look out for one another?"

He shrugged. "We do what we can, you know?" He reached out to shake my hand. "Sam."

"Hi, Sam." We shook, and he wandered off for a bit.

"Sister," Joe said suddenly, "I love you."

I smiled, but didn't say it back. How was I supposed to say it back? I liked him, cared about him, but I didn't love him. I have a lot of love in my life, a lot of people who love me and whom I love. It's only now that I'm fully realizing that I don't need the love of strangers -- I don't need them to love me, and I don't need to love them, either. It's only now that I'm fully realizing that Joe needs both.

"I'm really glad I met you, and I hope I see you around again," I said to him. I reached into my pocket for the money. He might have seen me do it, I don't know.

"Can I ask you a question?" he said. I said, "Sure," and he repeated it a few times -- "I gotta ask you a question. Can I ask you something? I just gotta ask. Honestly." Whatever it was, it wasn't too easy for him to say. "Sure," I told him, several more times.

"Do you have any money?"

Funny, since I'd been aiming to give him money all along. He hadn't been begging for it, I should add; he didn't have a cup out, wasn't asking for spare change. I pulled the bill out of my pocket, saw that it was a five rather than the ten I'd thought it was. I was relieved. We can afford five bucks more easily than ten. I pressed it into his palm.

"Little sister... I gotta tell you..." He seemed overwhelmed. The conversation went in some loops, more "I love yous," more affirmations of brotherhood. He stretched out two fingers -- I wasn't sure if it was a peace sign or an attempt to reach out to me. I pressed two fingers to his, like I was in E.T. or something.

He leaned in close. "Do you want it back?"

"No, no," I told him. "I want you to have it."

And he bent his head and started crying. Brittle, choking, broken sobs. The ashes from the cigarette Sam had given him scattered down his shirt front. He grabbed my hand and held it compulsively, shaking, sobbing, the brim of his cap covering his face. He glanced up once. "I'm dying," he told me, and I didn't know whether he meant that he was truly terminally ill -- he didn't look it, but how the hell do I know? -- or just that he could not see any way that a life like the one he was living could go on for much longer. "I'm sorry," I told him, watching my heart crack a bit from a long way off.

"I've got to go," I told him eventually, watching his hand over mine, the gnarled knuckles and yellow nails. "I have a job and I have to get back there or they won't be happy. I hope I'll see you again, okay?"

He looked up, his eyes dry. "I'm Joe Haskins," he said. "What's your name?"

I told him my first name.

"Kylie," he said. "Thank you."

I have not made any of this conversation up. It sounds saccharine, scripted, like an anecdote out of Chicken Soup for the Soul. But it's not. Sometimes I exaggerate stories for effect, mostly when I'm telling a funny story, but not now. I've rendered this as exactly as I can remember it because I need to convey that this was a man who was sane once, who once knew how to interact normally, who knew to say "Thank you" and how to introduce himself politely to a stranger and how to refuse offers of money if the giver can't afford them. If you'd been there you could have seen it in his face, like the flip of a switch when I started speaking to him. If he'd had all his teeth and had been able to speak straight, in that moment, you wouldn't have thought him any different from you and me.

He's certainly not that different from me. A tip of the wheel of fate -- born into a different family, not enough money, lousy luck in finding qualified mental health professionals (and I should add, an ability to find qualified mental health professionals who can save a life like mine from a fate like Joe's is not a foregone conclusion for even a middle-class girl) -- and I could have been exactly like Joe. That's what I see whenever I see a mentally ill homeless person on the street. I see myself hunched over a grocery cart, with wild hair and tattered clothes, loaded down with plastic bags and a battered sleeping roll.

Joe was beginning to let go of me when another guy showed up. "Hey, Joe," he said. He looked at me questioningly.

"You two know each other?"

"Know each other? I'm his father," the new guy said, settling down. "Jack Haskins the Fourth. Nice to meet you." I waved. "No, it's true, I really am," he said. I nodded. Meanwhile, another guy came up from the left. "Hey, guys." He reached out to shake my hand. "Paul Dowd. I'm his cousin."

"Okay. You guys will all look out for each other, right?" I addressed Paul, who seemed as sane and pulled-together as anyone else you'd happen to meet. "He'll be all right? Joe?"

Paul nodded. "Oh sure. Sometimes he just gets liquored up and he gets to feeling sorry for himself. He'll be fine."

"Thanks," I said. I addressed myself to Joe. "Bye now. Maybe I'll see you around again."

I don't remember what his reply was. I was already walking back to my job.

Walking back I thought about a lot of things. I knew, after the conversation, that if I'd tried to save Joe by bringing him to a hospital or a shelter or a soup kitchen or anywhere else, it wouldn't have mattered. He had his bench, his bench that he owned as far as he or anyone else was concerned. He had his family. I took a great deal of comfort from the family he had around him, his brother and his father and his cousin. As I'd left there had been a woman in a wheelchair coming over to join the group, a woman with an oxygen tube running through her nose. She had a family too. I had never known that. I had always thought homeless people lived entirely alone, cut off from the rest of the world. Now I know that at least in Boston Common, they have their own world. My assumption that the world of non-indigent, bustling, "normal" nine-to-fivers was the only world had turned out to be incorrect. Homeless people may be exiled from "polite" society, but some of them, at least, build their own societies to support their own lives.

And I thought about how I had always been scared of giving too much of myself to homeless people -- giving money whenever I saw them, even talking to them and putting that emotional investment into it -- because I thought they would take and take and take until I didn't know how to stop myself from bleeding dry. I thought of how little Joe had needed. His manner had changed the moment I'd spoken a kind word to him. It was very clear that no one had spoken kindly to him for a very long time. And maybe his short-term memory is shot and that's why he can't remember the last time someone was kind, but I don't think so. I think people are scared and uncomfortable and they don't think they can help and so they walk on by. And he kept shouting, kept shouting, "I'm dead".

And I don't know how long he'll remember me or whether he'll remember me at all, but I don't care. And I know he'll almost certainly use that five bucks I gave him for alcohol and I don't care about that either. The five bucks was not about getting him to a better place. Unless a miracle happens, he will never be in a better place than he is in now. He's settled, with a bench he calls his own and an adopted family around him, and change is too hard and too scary to even attempt when you have any kind of security at all. Five bucks was never going to change anything material, but when I gave it to him what it meant was that I cared, and my God but did he need that.

I am not telling this story to be boastful. I walk past dozens of homeless people a day and do nothing. I will come out and say something I didn't think I was going to confess publicly, that if he had been a black guy instead of a white guy I would not have felt comfortable approaching him, and I would have done nothing. I am not laying claim to sainthood. The only reason I did what I did was because I empathized with him because I am myself mentally ill.

But I needed to write the story for LJ, because I needed to tell people that there is a person in there and that person is as familiar as you or I. Not just "as human as you or I" -- I mean, duh. But as familiar. At some point when he was younger he had no idea he was going to end up where he is now, and neither did anyone around him. If things had been a little different he would have a life like yours or mine. And all of that was right under the surface. I mean, right under the surface.

There are plenty of mentally ill people who are violent and scary, and approaching them wouldn't have this effect -- I doubt most of them would lash out at someone who approached them kindly, or they'd be in jail already (prisons are full of untreated mentally ill people, and the court systems are not terribly lenient when it comes to homeless indigents who attack everyday upstanding citizens), but some would no doubt continue to yell aggressively. I'm not sure how it was that I evaluated Joe as someone who wouldn't do that. It wasn't just a guess and it was more than a hunch, but I couldn't explain it, so I can't pass on any advice, either. Other people will have to judge for themselves whether it feels safe to show kindness to people like Joe when they encounter them.

But I needed to have it known. Joe really, really, really needed someone to be kind to him, and it was so easy to show him that. Really. All the time I spent agonizing and pondering, I figured it would be this big damn deal to try and talk to this guy without getting hit or robbed or pleaded with endlessly, and the only thing he wanted was for someone to act like he was not a piece of shit they needed to scrape off their shoe.

I just needed to say it. I hope somebody who reads this will be in a situation at some point where they feel comfortable reaching out to someone who needs it.

I don't think I'll pray for Joe, because he told me not to. I'll keep thinking of him though. Maybe in some way it's the same thing.

*Not his real name.

I never posted about AmazonFail over on Twitter. λ and I still have no computer at our home -- hers has been in the repair shop for two weeks and will be there for another one; it will be several weeks more before we can afford a second home computer for my writing -- and as a result my ability to access the Internet has been slipshod. So I was offline for a day and a half, and when I came back to Twitter, everything was flooded with the tag #amazonfail. And honestly? I spent most of my time rolling my eyes about it. There is a certain kind of Internet outrage for which I have little tolerance. It happened with Strikethrough '08 and it happened with the Open-Source Boob Project and it's happened in a whole bunch of other circumstances that I don't remember. In each case people have gotten furious and posted to blogs and/or Twitter, and then their readers have gotten furious and posted to more blogs and/or Twitter, and then suddenly the whole Internet has exploded, and no one talks about anything else for weeks, and I wind up wanting to shoot my monitor with a 12-gauge. Most of the time there is a real, valid reason for the original objections. And by the time it's over, the outrage has snowballed on itself until the original objections are totally unrecognizable. And everyone's howling for blood and feeding off one another and journals are deleted and Godwin is invoked and just the idea of going on the Internet while it is going on makes me want to take a nap. AmazonFail appeared to be one of those things. I was not interested in being a part of it.

So I haven't. But it's been percolating in a corner of my brain. I wanted to ignore it, but it won't really be ignored, and I guess there are a few reasons. One is that I'm a lesbian. And the other is that I'm a writer.

As a lesbian, my objections are pretty much what you'd expect. Amazon has a tag for "adult" products that it doesn't want to come up in its main searches for fear of alienating some consumers; somehow that tag got out of control, and although a great deal of material wound up getting deranked, the amount of GLBT stuff that got snuffed was highly disproportionate. This is part of an old, old scene, people. Ever since I came out I have struggled to make peace with the fact that I am someone that many parents do not want their children to know about. These parents would like to erase my existence from their children's universe entirely. I am seen as no more than a sexual being -- a woman who has sex with other women -- and parents do not want their children to know that I exist. I am "adult material", and I am reminded of it all the time. I am reminded of it when conservatives start vociferous campaigns to ban Heather Has Two Mommies from school libraries and curricula, so that children will not know who or what gay people are. I was reminded of it when λ and I went on our honeymoon and, as we walked hand-in-hand through the Magic Kingdom, a mother placed her hand over her son's eyes so that he would not see us.* I was reminded of it, again on our honeymoon, when λ and I were splashing around in the pool being lovey-dovey, as you would expect from any honeymooning newlyweds, and a man came up to us and asked us to "cut it out, just so my daughter don't see."

So I'm not surprised that someone mis-tagged queer materials as "adult" on Amazon. I understand that it was not a top-down policy, that it seems to have been part of an inept corporate game of telephone in which one person made the policy and another person implemented part of it and another person did a different part of it and somewhere along the line someone conflated "queer" and "adult" in their mind. I know how it happened. I live with it, with that conflation of "queer" and "obscene", every day.

What I think is funny is that a lot of people seem to think that the fact that this was not a top-down policy that Amazon implemented as a deliberate screw-you to the queer community somehow makes this all better. "It was a mistake!", I hear. "It wasn't a big conspiracy! For God's sake stop freaking out!"

I am not freaking out, but I understand why many people are. It is because we have lived with this ever since the day we came to understand who we are and who we love, and this is not about one random person doing one thing in isolation. The fact that somebody thought of LGBTQ materials as "adult" is the result of an entire society that reinforces that idea.

And it's not just about the idea. It's not just because we smell homophobia in the air. It's because literature provides us with a voice, and Amazon is the largest and -- we thought -- most democratized, egalitarian provider of literature in our society, and if these books are not available on Amazon, it takes our voice away. I literally got sick to my stomach thinking about some of the books that Amazon made unavailable -- thinking about what it would mean if there had never been a controversy and those books had quietly disappeared from the most mammoth bookseller in the world. We're talking Stone Butch Blues, the raw, agonizing book that blew a hole in the status quo and told uncountable transpeople that they weren't alone, and we're talking about Gender Outlaw, which blew the hole wider and shouted a challenge to gender binaries loud and clear. We're talking Maurice and Well of Loneliness, two books that came around three-quarters of a century ago and told the world that gays and lesbians exist. We're talking about queer YA books, which tell teenagers struggling to come out that it's okay, others have been through this, they'll get through it and they have a place in the world. We're talking about books on the history of homophobia. We're talking about self-help books on coming out. We are talking about books that have been huge milestones in the history of the queer movement, books that have meant so much to God knows how many people and that we have already fought the censorship of time and again and again and again. For decades people have fought to keep these books alive and visible and available. Recently they became unavailable through the default bookseller of our time. Oh, it was a fuckup, Amazon? You didn't mean to? Gosh, but I so do not give a shit. Get it un-fucked up. Now.

That's my rant on the queer-censoring aspect. Now for the other part.

LGBTQQIA books are not the only books that were censored. You hear a lot of talk like they were, because there was this huge proportion of them that were, and because, like I've said, as far as queer people are concerned, this is a new slice at a very old wound. But there are plenty of books that were stripped of sales rankings that plain-out contained sexual material. This means everything from books on rape and sexual assault (Men Who Rape: The Psychology of Sexual Assault) to Lady Chatterley's Lover. So let me talk about censorship in general for a moment, because although I'm probably not saying anything original, if they were things that everyone understood, this stuff would never happen.

The books that were stripped of their ranks were, almost without exception, books that were already well-known and controversial. The books that aren't well-known never hit high enough in the sales rankings to turn up high in the search results, I guess, and thus didn't merit being flagged as "adult". And here's what that did: it ensured that the books that were the most groundbreaking, the most important, got snuffed first. Books that attract controversy are books that tell truths that people don't want to hear. A romance novel with sex scenes full of milk-white breasts cupped in the palms of big, strong hands and climaxing explosions of hot, wet passion are not going to get censored -- as we can see from the fact that they didn't. Books about heterosexual sex that titillate a little bit, but present no further challenges to the pretty sunshine-and-posies world that we like to pretend we live in, just aren't going anywhere. And, you know, that's great. Those are fun to read as an escape. Sure. No problem.

But then there are the books that are scary to the mainstream. The books about little girls who grow up to dress as men and act as men and experience pure agony when they're forced into a woman suit that doesn't fit, and who get hit and raped and arrested and degraded in innumerable ways for it. The books that tell you that the nice, clean-cut, good old boy from down the street might just get off on forcing women to have sex with him. The books about people who, owning their own bodies as all of us do, decide to rent them out to make some money. All of the books about things that people condemn because they're scared of them, because they shatter the rose-colored glasses. Because when you murmur "Ignore it and it'll go away," these books and the people who write them get in your face and say "We will not BE ignored."

So that's what Amazon blundered into with their "adult" tags. And we see which side they picked.

( musing on the current book I'm writing; generalized discussion of rape, but mostly I'm cutting not for triggers but for length )

Censorship is about free speech, but not in the sense of some dry legal principle. Censorship is what happens when society tells people either that they don't exist, or that they shouldn't exist, or that the things they believe in shouldn't exist. So someone or a group of someones gather the courage to stand up and shout for their basic right to an acknowledged existence. And society -- angrily or casually, actively or passively -- goes "Nope. As far as we're concerned, you aren't there."

Censorship is the denial of the existence of groups of people -- or of their choices, which are part of who people are and become more so as others define them by those choices. It's about making people invisible. It's about erasure.

Amazon decided to flag "adult" books. The trouble is that we don't live in a "non-adult" world. We don't live in a world where "adult" things do not exist and when we encounter them it is generally not because we choose to step into an alter universe of "adulthood". The things Amazon classes as "adult" are all around us, and some people's lived experiences overlap very little with such things, but for some of us, those things *are* our lived experience. This is why the fact that the tag was mismanaged to shut out LGBTQ material doesn't change the fundamental wrongness of the tag at all. There is no up side in preventing people from finding information that they are actively searching for. And there's nothing acceptable in whitewashing reality to help people's pretty fantasies of what the world ought to look like.

So. Yeah. Get it fixed, Amazon.

*And because she was watching us and not him, she walked him straight into a trash can.

So Jane Adams is in a new movie called Lifelines^{1, 2}. Here are some things to note about this movie:

• It is getting good reviews.³
  
• It is the first movie in which Jane Adams has had top billing, or indeed any sort of major role at all, since Happiness in 1998.
  
• It is only showing in New York and LA.

When I originally wrote this entry I drafted it out in Notepad and I had a very long and punctuationless spiel here about how I was posting a poll but the posting of the poll should not be taken to indicate in any way shape or form that I was considering either or perhaps any of the options that it included, because so far from considering them I didn't even know what they would be or how many of them there would be, hence the "either or any" part, because sometimes my fingers just take over and ask things about Hannah Montana and it is not my fault at all and no one should ever suspect that I would do anything as wacky or excruciatingly uncool as the options that I think my fingers might want to type into the poll only I couldn't be sure, you see, because I hadn't typed it yet. Anyway, I forgot to copy-paste that part, and then I closed Notepad without saving. I know you all mourn its loss. Ahem.

We now return to our regularly scheduled broadcasting:

Poll #1381297
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Which of the following things would you be more likely to do?

Thank you for your input. Of course I have already forgotten what the poll says, my fingers’ muscle memory being short; but I am sure I will value your contributions.

¹Yes, the movie used to be titled Wherever You Are, and no, IMDb hasn’t caught up with the change yet.
²Yes, the art on the movie poster for this looks exactly like the one for Happiness.
³”One of the most exquisite images on screen this year was the lovely face of the brilliantly talented Jane Adams, who plays Nancy, the mother of a profoundly dysfunctional family in this film from first-time writer-director Rob Margolies.” There are other good reviews but this is the one I am plucking because I TOLD YOU SHE IS AWESOME AND ALSO BEAUTIFUL, I TOLD YOU ALL, AND NOW MOVIE MOM SAYS IT TOO, AND SURELY YOU WILL NOT CONTRADICT THE AUGUST (ALBEIT ADVERB-ADDLED)ⁱAUTHORITY OF MOVIE MOM

ⁱYAY ALLITERATION<sup>meeble

meeble</sup>ONLY I DON'T THINK IT COUNTS AS ALLITERATION BECAUSE THOSE AREN'T ALL THE SAME SOUND, LIKE HOW YOU SHOULDN'T COUNT "COVETED CHOCOLATE CONFECTION" OR SOMETHING AS ALLITERATION BECAUSE THE CH SOUND IS NOT THE SAME AS THE C SOUND<sup>weeble

weeble</sup>OMG WHY AM I YELLING IN MEEBLY-WEEBLY FOOTNOTES

In the past I have done a variety of April Fool's Day blogs, from attempting (not very successfully) to convince you all that I was marrying chavvah to attempting (surprisingly, somewhat more successfully) to convince you all that I was looking for a guy to impregnate me, ah, the traditional way and was hoping someone on my LJ would volunteer. Glowing Flush with success from last year, I was eager to try something similar this year, and spent a lot of last night mulling over funny options for April Fool's Day posts.

Except they weren't funny! None of them were! Nobody would care if I decided to research my next book by giving up my job and hitchhiking randomly around the country, or if I became a Scientologist, or if I said I was fed up with trying to publish Sockpuppet and offered to sell the rights to it to the highest bidder. An appropriate followup to last year might be to make a very nervous post about how λ and I had been trying to get pregnant -- secretly at first, because we'd just begun the process and were afraid of getting our hopes up -- and were now pregnant with nonuplets because of an overdose of fertility drugs and were terrified of the public reaction that would ensue in the wake of the terribly nicknamed "octo-mom".* Actually, I thought about saving that one for a year in which we actually are trying to get pregnant, but by then the octo-mom will be old hat. And no one would believe it anyway.

So. I have no April Fool's Day post, guys. I am beaten. I am witless. I am humorless. I am dumb.

HEY, YOU! YOUR FLY'S UNZIPPED!

Happy April 1.

*Seriously, though, guys, Dr. Phil would show up on our doorstep. A THOUGHT TO GIVE YOU NIGHTMARES. God do I hate that asshole.