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march 29, 1999
saturday night leslie feinberg spoke here. i just finished reading stone butch blues last week, so it was wonderful to be able to hear her and meet her....
she talked to us for almost two hours... about all sorts of fascinating things. she spoke for quite a while at the beginning just about the definitions of all the different terms... transsexual, transgender, etc. the concept of trans-liberation seems truly liberating. i'm not really sure how she would define it, but what it means to me is just the idea that our sex does not need to determine our gender expression... an acceptance of a broader definition of gender. eventually, a world in which gender is no more significant than... i don't know. than...

hm. i'm actually having trouble concentrating on this right now. sorry. it was a truly inspiring talk, especially her discussion of coalition building among different groups. she gave me hope. which is not an everyday occurance. i mean, i try to be a hopeful person in general, but the world seems really f*%$ed up right now.

we're bombing buildings and probably some people in a small country across the ocean because the people there hate each other because they have different religions, and some of them are more powerful than others and are killing the others and i don't know what we should be doing, but i'm not sure it's what we are doing. part of me says, to what extent can we presume to be the world's arbiter of justice when we can't even stop poverty and violence and hatred (racism, classism, sexism, anti-gay violence both legal and physical....) in our own country? part of me thinks that it would be selfish in a way though to turn our backs on all the problems of the world and only focus on ourselves -- aren't we americentric enough already? part of me abhorrs the little i know about what goes on in kosovo enough to want to stop it by any means necessary... but somehow fighting violence with violence has never made sense to me...

i'm too confused about all this. far too conflicted.

and the world is just seeming like a difficult place to live in anyway for me right now, because i'm faced with this decision of where i should be next semester. i could come back to swarthmore and do a semester of just sort of fun classes... cultural constructions of africa, faulkner morrison and representation of race, maybe even a directed creative writing project... or i could take a semester off. i've got the credits to do it and graduate on time and everything. but what would i be doing? that's what i don't know. and that's the hard part. there are a lot of places in the world that, no matter how wonderful they may be, are not as good for me as here. i have friends here and wonderful connections. what's hard is that two of my current roommates (ary and arg) will probably be out of the country. picturing life here without them is difficult. so that's the stress that's wrapped itself around me right now. i have to decide, like, very soon. like within two or three days. i don't know how to even begin.

so... life's not all bad though. i went to see dan bern last thursday, and it made my week. i've had the big balls song stuck in my head everyday. it's great. he was great. go check out his page!
well. i think that's gonna be all for now. gotta get on with the business of being stressed... i'm off to read cool articles for my asian sex class. enjoy the rest of the pages.

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