–I realized I have a nervous habit which ought to amuse you gun nuts. You’ll remember many weeks ago when I shot a gun? Well, I picked up one of the outer thingies… a case, I guess… and put it in my jacket pocket meaning to bring it home and stick it on my altar. I haven’t yet managed to get it out of my pocket. And lately I realized that when I put my jacket on, the first thing I do is check for my keys and the second thing I do is check to make sure I still have that. When I’m stressed, I like to roll it around in my hand. Y’all have clearly fucked with my head.
–Making meatballs in the crock pot led to an unforeseen consequence. The meatballs, after having cooked all day, were so tender you could barely get them out of the pot in one piece. And they weren’t as good as Mom’s. I don’t think I added enough brown sugar. Mom claims it’s because I left out the rolled oats. I refuse to believe there are rolled oats in her meatballs, but maybe that’s her secret ingredient.
–I’ve been thinking about the term “ally” as in “People of color and their allies” and “transfolks and their allies” and “feminists and their allies” and I think I just have to say, I’m not your ally. I’m not even sure, for sure, what it means. But it feels to me a little like a trap, both for you and for me, because it seems to promise some level of “getting it” that I don’t have, some level of safety that I can’t actually promise. “Ally” feels like a shorthand way of bridging distances that maybe should be respected. I don’t know, maybe it’s all the time I’ve spent (mis)reading the German philosophers, but it seems to me that the truth is both that people are the same–that people are people–and that people are ultimately, very different from each other. And the truth is that that’s both a cop-out and profound. See what I’m getting at? It’s in that tension where… Oh fuck me… this is unclear and I sound like a stoned college student.
–The TCP afghan is coming along a lot slower now that I’m not just sitting around with my dad all day.
–I want to ponder more about the weirdness that is that country music from my youth tendency to pair gruff sounding men with backup singers that sound so slick and tight you could about use them as a raincoat. But I don’t really have any more to say about it than that.
Filed under: Random Things
Perhaps your trepidation about the word “ally” has to do with a basic and instinctive resistance to being absorbed into an entity which creates a generalized group identity that pre-supposes your mode of thinking about issues for which the group has stated and standard opinions which may or may not be shared by you.
Or maybe not.
I think Allies are simply people or groups of people joined together in pursuit of a common goal.
[...] Aunt B. is waxing philosophical about the term “and their allies”: I’ve been thinking about the term “ally” as in “People of color and their allies” and “transfolks and their allies” and “feminists and their allies” and I think I just have to say, I’m not your ally. I’m not even sure, for sure, what it means. But it feels to me a little like a trap, both for you and for me, because it seems to promise some level of “getting it” that I don’t have, some level of safety that I can’t actually promise. “Ally” feels like a shorthand way of bridging distances that maybe should be respected. I don’t know, maybe it’s all the time I’ve spent (mis)reading the German philosophers, but it seems to me that the truth is both that people are the same–that people are people–and that people are ultimately, very different from each other. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]