aquabean: (This above all...)
Before anything else, I want to say a profound thank you to everyone who left comments of support or understanding about yesterday. Getting back to you is something I very much intend to do, it's just been a bit tired around here lately, so it might take a few days. But not too long. Promise.



I spent my morning, hiding behind the large flat screen of my computer monitor quietly crying to myself. Tears slid, like tiny snails, down my face and into the corners of my mouth, where I licked them away before I rubbed away their trails with the cuff of my black turtleneck sweater. Crying that hard, for that long will make a person's nose run, which mine did, so I sniffled through the morning as well. When it finally came time for lunch I was a damp puffy mess who needed to get some sun and maybe pull herself together.

I woke up this morning feeling as though a light bulb in the billboard of my mind had gone out and I had no spare with which to replace it. )


Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look a the sky
and say thank you
we are standing y the water looking out
in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chose we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the back of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on the stairs we are saying thank you

in the backs that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

by W.S. Merwin
aquabean: (Prodigal...)
Up until today, I'd never really thought about it. So I'm gay. I'm out to my friends, even if I'm not out to my parents, and my girlfriend is amazing. It's just how things are.


This afternoon I was called into the office of the site manager where I work and told that I should, from this point on, refrain from talking about my personal life or making any kind of reference to any significant other while at work. Because someone had complained. No. They'd "expressed some concern."

Because I'd said to someone commenting on my height, "Yeah, my girlfriend teases me about it all the time."

What I do for this company is job recruiting. I interview people, bring them in for testing and then, if they pass, send them down for supervisor interviews. It's just as straight forward as it sounds. A pun that I should have realized would be taken very much to heart.

The "concern" was expressed anonymously, though, based on the incident that was given to me I know exactly who was there and have a fairly good idea as to who it was that spoke to the management. I'm not sure that we hired them.

Bad enough, that I should be told that I will be required not to mention one of the people most important to me, even in passing, while in the office, the reasoning becomes enough to leave me numb. Because, apparently, as the recruiter I'm one of the first impressions that potential employees are given of the company. My mentioning my personal life -- and at this point in the conversation my Significant Other was mentioned specifically -- may give them a bad impression of the company at large.

There is a slightly sick feeling lingering in the back of my throat. Perhaps I should have gotten madder. Perhaps I should have asked more questions. Perhaps, though, they're right. It isn't professional to talk about your personal life to people you don't know. There's no reason to bring it up, and certainly no reason to think that anyone else would care.

Except that I can not shake the feeling that if I had said that the person teasing me was a boyfriend, or a husband, or simply tacked an S onto the end of just one word in that statement, this conversation never would have taken place.

But maybe I'm wrong.

Am I being foolish and immature by thinking that talking about the Girl is a given right? An adult, a well and truly mature adult, would be able to suck it up and simply accept that life doesn't always operate in the manner we think it should and sometimes we make choices that mean we have to do things we don't like. The part of me that fears my parent's rejection, that wonders at whether I would be allowed to family events, is screaming that what else did I expect? To be a functioning member of society certain accepted sacrifices are made. Live outside those expectations and other sacrifices will be added to your list. And this is one of mine.

Yet this too feels unfair. It feels wrong.

Again, I wonder at my own lack of anger. I think that maybe it simply comes from the fact that I don't know where to put it. I don't even know that I have any right to it. Having smiled through the whole interview, nothing being more important showing them I understood and wouldn't make any kind of fuss, it seems I've gotten stuck on Fine, and everything except a kind of numb shock has abandoned me. This whole post is so much less clear than I would like, and perhaps I'll come back later and clean it up, but it will do for now.



At least I got my car back this afternoon, fixed and running better than it has in months and months.
aquabean: (Between the potency and the essence)
It occurs to me to wonder whether it is, in fact, a legitimate thing to say that one misses places one has never actually been.

Trying to explain that should thirteen small men be waiting for me in my apartment this evening when I get home because they need a fourteenth I would be totally unsurprised, is rather harder than one might imagine.  )
aquabean: (Silent)
I find myself blankly offended.

In some ways I'm even more offended because I am a Christian. My faith has always been important to me. Being queer and Christian are two things that most people seem to feel are mutually exclusive, but I can't agree. And then I read things like this. It is painful on a fundamental level. To feel this kind of hatred aimed at me by people who claim, at the same time, to want to bring "Christ's love" to the world.

"You telling these miserable, Hell-bound, bath house-wallowing, anal-copulating fags that God loves them!? You have bats in the belfry!"

That? Where does that come from? Where does that kind of hate fit into Christ's tenant that we are to "love your neighbor as yourself"? It doesn't. It's that simple. It just doesn't. I know that growing up I was terrified of my own sexuality. That the very idea that I might be even a little bit "that way" was something that was out of the question. My ability to wrap my mind around the thought that I was queer wasn't something I was capable of. Convinced that I would be disowned and abandoned, I simply decided to ignore it. My bisexuality was something I viewed as a kind of safety net. I wasn't lying to anyone, I wasn't doing anything wrong, I simply didn't allow that aspect of myself to have any kind of outward effect on my life. I lived the "don't ask don't tell" ideal.

And it ate me from the inside out. )

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