Random Acts of Observation

I've been watching a very interesting 4-part series on the American PBS channel for the last couple of weeks, called African-American Lives.

The set-up is that a group of about a dozen high-profile African-Americans, including Tina Turner, Don Cheadle, Chris Rock, Morgan Freeman, Maya Angelou and Jackie Joyner-Kersee (these being the people I was familiar with through the media) agreed to have their family histories searched, making use of every available methodology including genetic testing and comparisons with several different genetic databases.

As a Canadian, I didn't (and still don't) know much about the specific history of black people in the U.S., but watching this has taught me a lot more than I used to know. It'a also brought home to me once again how powerful is the emotional impact on a whole people who must, in order to examine where they came from, face the fact that their mothers and fathers were the property of others, and that for many there is no way to go through the loss of family connection to the past and to a place that has been an almost universal experience of the African diaspora.

Watching it has made me think again about a book I read a couple of years ago, Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (my original review is here).

Even though my ancestors were driven from their homes, forcibly loaded into boats for a voyage across the Atlantic during which many died from the poor conditions and brutal treatment, only to disembark in a country they had never heard of before, at least I can trace my family names back to specific places in the outer islands of Scotland, and my family, when they arrived in Canada, were poor, but they were not property. I can imagine, but I can't understand in my heart and in my gut, and probably no one else who can say what I can say, can understand either, what it means to have those two facts overshadowing anything and everything one knows about one's past, one's family, one's history, one's roots.

Which is part of what makes certain moments of this TV show so powerful: watching the faces of these people as they are shown the records of family members identified in the slave schedules, or listed in wills ot bills of sale, as they visit a piece of land owned by a free ancestor, or find a marked grave, as DNA evidence links them to a particular African people and gives them a past that stretches beyond the darkness of the middle Passage.

Every once in a while, someone I know on the Netz finds a website that does work with Implicit Association testing, and I go and test myself again. I've been doing this for a long time, longer than most, because I used to know via a particular fandom one of the students of the original researchers on this particular methodology and I took a test she had developed for her own research project.

So I have a fairly long history of taking them. I may be testwise by now, but I try to measure that by, whenever I find a new site that tests some new set of implicit associations, finding one of the first tests I ever took and retaking it to see if there's been a change in my results. There hasn't been yet. And I try to approach each new test I take with a clear mind, focused on the task and not on what the results will be.

So today I wandered through my flist and followed some links to the Harvard IAT test site. There were some new tests that I hadn't taken before, and a few that I had, so I took some new ones and retook a couple of them.

As usual, I am bothered by some of my responses.

My responses to one of the new ones I took was perfectly understandable. It turns out that I have a strong automatic preference for fat people over thin people. Seeing as I am fat, and that society is obsessed with thinness to the point of unhealthiness, especially for women, that's likely a good thing. It probably means that while I'm concerned about health issues, at least I think fat people can be good.

I also have always demonstrated a moderate to strong automatic preference for gay people over straight people. Again, being bisexual, I tend to identify with gay people more than I do with straight people, in general terms, so that one makes sense, too.

It also turns out that I do not have an automatic association between men and science, as opposed to women and science, which makes sense because I'm a woman who has always been interested in the sciences and has spend a lot of time thinking about anti-woman stereotypes and assumptions and I think in my time I've managed to get over a lot of them at a pretty deep level.

Here's the stuff that I don't get.

Over the years I've been trying these tests out, I have consistently been told that my responses demonstrate a strong automatic preference for black or dark-skinned people over white or light-skinned people. My responses also apparently indicate that I automatically associate North American Aboriginal people with being American to a much greater extent than I associate whites with being American and that I don't appear to think Asian people are "foreign" compared to white people. I'm apparently neutral in terms of religions - I have pretty much the same pattern of associations with Judaism as I do with other religions. I apparently also have a moderate automatic preference for Arab Muslims over other people. All of these responses are apparently anywhere from somewhat to very uncommon - for instance, my response to the preference test for black people vs. white people is found in about three percent of the American test population.

Here's what bothers me. I am white, raised in a predominantly white environment. While it is true that over the years I have had colleagues, friends and lovers of other races and religious groups, I was, like every other white person in North America (at least) raised in relative privilege and raised to be racist.

So when I look at these results, I wonder, and I worry. Am I unconsciously faking out the tests to reassure myself that I'm "not really" a racist? Have I fetishised people of colour? Or am I just so disgusted by the history of white people’s behaviour in general and American/North Americans in particular that I automatically favour any other group of people in a context where I am thinking about prejudice and race? I'm not sure I understand or trust what may or may not be going on in my head, especially with respect to the responses to race-based tests.

And the literature I’ve found online isn’t much help. Most of it seems to be focused on either reassuring me that I’m not a bad person because my results show bias against minority groups, or arguing that the tests are invalid because they make almost everyone appear biased against minority groups. There’s nothing that I can find about people who appear to be consistently biased against majority groups, even the ones that they are members of.

But there have to be other people like me that have a consistent anti-privilege bias, because that’s what seems to be the connecting thread in all of my responses over the years. This would even explain my response to the religions test – if I was unconsciously faking it, you’d think I would have come out strongly pro-Judaism, but if I’m being anti-privilege, then I’d be expected to get confused with this test, because it’s not comparing responses between two religious groups with unequal privilege in North American, but rather comparing Judaism on one hand and a collection of several other religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and North American Aboriginal spiritual traditions as well as Christianity, on the other hand. And while I’m well-known to be severely critical of Christianity as the privileged religion in North America, I would expect that I’d tend to favour the other religions included as much as I’d favour Judaism.

But I wish I could find more information on how to interpret consistent responses like mine on race-based tests coming from white people. Does it make sense to think what’s going on in my head is an anti-privilege bias? Or am I just trying to justify some unusual manifestation of inherent racist thinking? Or am I overthinking the whole damn thing?

There may be an om in moment
But there's very few folk in focus
Not the first, not the last, not the least.
You needn't be well to be wealthy
But you've got to be whole to be holy
Fetch the rope, fetch the clock, fetch the priest.
Oh this planet of ours is a mess
I bet Heaven's the same
Look the madman said, "Son,
As a friend, tell me what's in a name,"
Hallowed be thy name.

I give you the state of statesmen
And the key to what motivates them
On the left, on the right, on the nail
Still I don't see a man in a mansion
That an accurate pen won't puncture
Go to town, go to hell, go to jail.
And there's bars and saloons
Where the jukebox plays blues in the night
Till the madman says "Son,
Time to go we could both use some light"
And thy will be done.

We live in an age of cages
The tale of an ape escaping
In the search for some truth he can use
But many a drunk got drunker
And mostly a thinker, thunker
Set the place, set the time, set the fuse,
The optimist laughed and the pessimist cried in his wine
And the madman said "Son,
Take a word they'll all wake given time"
Let thy kingdom come

The madman and I got drunker
Till both thought the other thank you
And we laughed all the way to the stars
The optimist asked for a taste of the pessimist's wine
And the madman said "Son,
How do you feel?" I said "Me? I feel fine
Lead me into temptation
Into temptation
I said into temptation
I need my allocation of recreation
I want a revelation in degradation
No hesitation, give me variation, give me inspiration..."
(Greg Lake and Peter Sinfield)


Drinking the pessimist's wine, but still hoping. May the new year bring us all inspiration and truths we can use.

On September 11, 2001, and on the long days following it, thousands of fire-fighters, police officers, and volunteers worked in the ruins of the World Trade Center, breathing in a toxic mixture of chemicals, concrete dust, asbestos, fibreglass, petroleum combustion byproducts, and some things that had never existed before because no one had ever burned all those substances together in one place before. Many had inadequate breathing gear, or none at all.

In the days following September 11, 2001, many New Yorkers remained in the city, or returned within just days or weeks, breathing in the dust, cleaning up the hazardous waste that filled their homes and offices, often with nothing more than a wet rag and a dust mop. Christine Todd Whitman, the head of the EPA assured them that the air was safe to breathe.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of New Yorkers, many of them firefighters, police officers and others who worked at Ground Zero, are now disabled due to conditions that can be medically linked to their exposures to toxins on September 11 and the days following. Some have died. Many more are still working, but struggling with asthma, gastric complaints, headaches, diminished lung capacity, dozens of other medical problems. Some are beginning to develop environmentally-induced cancers. Medical experts in human response to toxic exposures predict that as time passes, more and more of those exposed will get sick, those who are already sick will, for the most part, get sicker, and more will die.

Most of them have faced disbelief, resistance and denial every step of the way from their insurers and their governments in their search for workers' compensation, medical pensions, appropriate health care.

Many of these people were honoured by their government as heroes five years ago. What a difference five years can make.

Whan and how did you arrive at your essential political, ethical and religious/spiritual philosophies? Have you always tended in certain directions and simply found the influences that brought you to where you are today, or did someone or something teach you/influence you/make you think about these positions and values?

Last night, I was talking with my partner glaurung about some of the books and authors from my youth that I've been re-reading of late (details available on my book journal, bibliogramma. I noticed that a lot of them, quite unbeknownst to me at the time, were fairly radical in some ways - Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Suzette Haden Elgin's At The Seventh Level, Samuel Delany's work... in fact, the other night, I was re-reading Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset, published in 1963, and ran across a small passage in which her attempt at a historical King Arthur is looking around at his band of companions, sitting around socializing after a hard day's work of hunting down Saxons, and sees two of his warriors having a cuddle in the corner. His thoughts are basically - lots of warriors form such relationships while on campaign and away from women, but these two really seem to be in love, which is only going to make them better warriors because they won't want to fight poorly in front of their lover.

So I was sort of wondering if perhaps, it was all of this stuff I'd read as a child that had started me on the path to becoming a left-wing radical with some very strong feelings about social justice, a pagan animist with some very strong feelings about the unity of all things, and all of those other values that underpin who I am.

But then my partner pointed out that I'd also read everything Heinlein had ever written when I was a child, and a lot of books by other people, some fairly right-wing, militaristic, crypto-fascist, etc., and hadn't been particularly influenced by them, other than to think about what was wrong in their worldviews, from my perspective, anyway.

Having a working mother back in the early 60s when this was not really common for a white middleclass child may have had something to do with my becoming a feminist at a very early age, but my mother was far from being a radical in political terms. I was raised until the age of about 12 or 13 without any continuing religious influences, except for one grandmother who kept trying to put me into Bible classes, but I didn't see her often at all. Then my mother converted to Judaism, but I was old enough that she simply asked my to keep kosher in the house out of respect for her, so while I studied the basic principles with her, I wasn't being pressured to adopt any particular faith, which was a good thing because by then I'd already developed the basic structure of my own beliefs, which were not at all like those of Judaism or Christianity.

So what was it? What made me initially susceptible to a left-wing/socialist and at the same distinctly spiritual and mystical set of perspectives on the world I live in? Sometimes it seems to me as though I have always felt this way, and that I uncovered my core beliefs rather than developed them, as I would read or hear one thing that said to me "yes, of course, that just feels right" and then read or hear something else and feel that there was something basically wrong about it - and that the rest was simply refining my feelings of "rightness" and "wrongness" with evidence and reason.

And how about you?

So, as just about everyone must know by now, a bill redefining marriage as a union between two people to the exclusion of all others passed in the Canadian House of Commons last night, and barring some totally unforeseen circumstance, will be signed into law within the next week or so. So, we've won the right for everyone to marry who they want to, and that's the end of it... or is it?

As I said in a previous rant, the general belief of many opponents of this legislation is that "marriage is so special, you know, and if queers get their deviant and debauched claws of doom on it, all marriage between heterosexuals will immediately collapse into the same primordial slime the rest of us are condemned to live our lives in."

Throughout this long fight for the recognition of relationships between two men or two women, most people have been doing their best to assure straight, non-secular folks that nothing's really going to change. And in one very real sense, it won't. No matter what kind of relationship *I* have, there's no reason why it should affect *your* relationship. My being queer isn't going to make someone else queer if they aren't already - whether they've become aware of it or not. Having a queer married couple living next door is not going to send anyone else to the divorce court, unless that relationship was already doomed.

To quote myself again, I said "I still have not been able to find one opponent of same-sex marriage who can make an effective argument, without resorting to religion, about how the marriage of two men or two women is going to irretrievably damage existing marriages between a man and a woman, or the concept of marriage, or society, or the fate of the universe." And I do believe that's true - same-sex marriage isn't going to damage marriage, or society, and it certainly has nothing to do with the fate of the universe.

But I do think it is part of a long slow change in the idea of what family is, and how families function in society. And that what has happened is a big step forward in that process of change. And that where we are headed is going to upset some people deeply.

What is happening, and what this legislation is part of, is the secularisation of liminal events in human life and the personalisation of ritual. We are moving away from a kind of social structure that has existed for most of the history of our kind, a social structure in which a common religion marked all the important changes in a person's social status - birth, coming of age, marriage, becoming a parent, death. What that religion was, and what events were seen as liminal, depended on what the particular culture was, but until very recently in terms of human history, that's just how it was. And the political organisation of that culture - be it clan, tribe, state, whatever - reflected the dictates of religion with respect to the definitions of all of these statuses.

But all that is breaking down - has been, very slowly, for three or four hundred years, actually - and at an increasing pace. We are moving toward a social structure where the state records and acknowledges personal, not religious, definitions of these liminal events, and where religious recognition becomes an individual and optional element in these events - often a very important element, but not the sufficient and necessary element.

With the passage of the Civil Marriages Act, we now have in Canada a situation where religious marriage and civil marriage have distinctly different definitions. It's been that way for a while, actually - the Catholic Church does not recognise civil marriages where one person has been previously married but whose marriage has not been properly dissolved under canon law. But it's now clear to everyone - civil marriage is defined in secular terms, and religious marriage is defined according to religious beliefs.

If the definition of civil marriage is whatever the state agrees to record and acknowledge, without consideration of religious beliefs, then that definition can change again as ideas of what forms a family can take change and evolve. The concept of marriage, at its heart, is about commitment and caring - which may extend to making commitments to and caring for children within that marriage. We've already decided that the race, ethnicity, religion or gender of the adults in a marriage is irrelevant to its legitimacy. The next change to the secular definition, I think, will be the number of adults in a marriage.

And it's still not going to affect anybody else's marriage if I get myself hitched to a dozen people of all genders and colours and cultures. Nor is it going to change the essence of marriage, or bring about the collapse of society or the end of the world. And not all of the ranting of narrow-minded people who can't understand that nurturing love in all its forms can only add to the peace, justice and joy in the world can make it otherwise.

Another book meme. Oh well, I suppose that things in the "real" world are just so fucking insane that I'm finding more that I enjoy talking about in the world of books than the world of so-called reality. Not that I think what I'm reading in the newspapers is actually reality, but you all surely know more-or-less what I mean.

Taken from chlaal

1) How many books do you have?

chlaal said "I'm amazed by the concept of people actually knowing how many books they have," and I'm going to have to agree with her on that. What also makes this question somewhat difficult to answer is the fact that my partner and I are both omnivorous readers, but even though we both buy books, they’re really all pretty much "ours."

Based on average books per foot of shelving multiplied by approximate feet of shelving, I'd say we have between 2,250 and 2,500 books. And no, in most rooms we can't see very much of the walls, why do you ask?


2) What is the last book you bought?

Actually, the last book I have was bought for me by my partner, but it was from my "wish list" of science fiction and fantasy books (a 5-page list, and growing I might add - how dare these people write more books before I've finished reading the ones they've already written?) - Midnight Harvest, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, one in her very lengthy and entertaining Count Saint-Germain series.

The last books (shopping spree) I bought myself were mostly for my partner's birthday, but since I also intend to read them, I'll list them here.

Islam and Democracy, Fatima Mernissi
Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, Nancy Mairs
A Troubled Guest: Life & Death Stories, Nancy Mairs
Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction & Beyond, Marleen S. Barr
Future: Tense, Gwynne Dyer
Gifts, Ursula K. LeGuin
The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs


3)What is the last book you read?

The last book I finished was Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, by Nancy Mairs. I'm currently reading Corporation by Joel Bakan.


4) Five books that mean a lot to me.

Hmm. The last meme I did listed ten of my favourite books, all of which mean a lot to me. So I'm going to see if I can think of five books that mean a lot to me that weren’t on the previous list.

1. Babel-17 by Samuel Delany. I read this when I was quite young (not yet 10) and every few months I still find myself in a conversation and suddenly realise just how much it influenced me, on everything from my approach to language and poetry to my attitudes toward gender reassignment surgery.

2. Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach. I've never denied I was a hippie. 'Nuff said.

3. The Glass Bead Game, by Herman Hesse. I gained a lot of insights about spirituality, epistemology, meditation, and the balance of life from thinking about this book.

4. The Dialectic of Sex: Case for Feminist Revolution, by Shulamith Firestone. For some people it was The Feminist Mystique, for some it was The Female Eunuch - and I'm not saying those books didn't affect me profoundly, because they did – but Firestone's book put feminism into a larger context and gave it a burning heart for me. I am the kind of feminist – and very likely the kind of socialist – that I am today because of the place she gave me to start my journey.

5. The Golden Bough, by James Frazier. I tend to see life, language, thought in terms of symbols, parallels, thematic connections. It's a deeply ingrained part of how I think, and I suspect I owe a great deal of that to an early and intensely thorough reading of this book.

So, interestingly enough, this turned out to be, not so much about my favourite books, as about some of the books that shaped who I am.

No Pity. No Shame. No Silence.

The other night I watched a film called “Prey for Rock and Roll.” Not a great film, but one scene was very powerful, at least for me. In an all-woman band, one of the band members has been raped. Another band member writes a song about rape. They sing it. The song is:

Every Six Minutes

Every six minutes, someone says "no"
Every six minutes, she gets ignored
It's not what you're wearing, it’s not where you've been
The fact that they think so tells you somethin' bout sin.
Every 6 minutes, a woman cries
Because every 6 minutes, her pleas are denied
No one's asking for it, it's no woman's secret desire
The fact that they think so is a man-made lie.
The passing of time brings you closer to me
Cause I've got love and justice keeps you free
I've got .38 special reasons at my side
Face the ultimate "no" big boy, this time I'll decide
If I had a bullet, for every six minutes
I know just where to put it, every six minutes
If I had a bullet, for every six minutes
I know just where to put it, every six minutes
If I had a bullet, for every six minutes
I know just where to put it, every six minutes

By Cheri Lovedog and Grace Chapman
(lyrics incomplete)


The song hit me to the core. Even though I abhor violence, even though I believe that revenge is never the answer to violence, even though I don’t want anyone running around with a gun for any reason. Deep inside me, something roared “Yes!”

And yesterday, I found that misia’s powerful statement about sexual violence, and people’s responses to it, had migrated to the small corner of Ljland that I inhabit.

So now many people around me are writing about sexual abuse and sexual violence. It’s a hard topic to start writing about, I find. Do I talk about my personal experiences with it? Or its history? Its sociological meanings? The different kinds of sexual violence? Who does it, who has it done to them, and why? The way sexuality and violence mixes together that makes so many blurred edges? The questions of fantasy versus reality, of consensual sex and power play versus the violation of the will that is rape. So much to talk about.

Back in the sixties and seventies, when some of us first started saying things akin to “no pity, no shame, no silence,” we also used to say that the personal is the political. And politics is about power. And so is sexual violence. So here’s the personal:

In my own life I can think of at least half a dozen occasions where a man, or a group of men, have tried to block my path, encircle me, trap me, prevent me from getting away from them, while they made sexual comments or threats of violence, mostly sexual, to and about me. One of these times, it was a groups of about five adolescent males in a car, who made several moves as if they were going to run me over if I didn’t stop and let them say, and possibly do, whatever they wanted to me.

On several more occasions, a man has followed me on foot or by car, making sexual comments or gestures whenever he got near enough to me.

Once I was stalked by a man for several weeks. I first became aware of him when he started a perfectly normal conversation with me in a public library, and then asked me out. I declined politely. He kept showing up at the library whenever I was there, and kept approaching me. I started being very careful about the path I took going home from, always going a round-about way and making sure he wasn’t following me. Eventually, I stopped going to that branch, even though it was the closest and one of the best in the city for my interests.

Two or three times a man has grabbed one or both of my arms and tried to hold onto me or pull me somewhere while making a sexual threat or suggestion.

Once, when I was 12, I took a short-cut one summer evening through an overgrown area by the river that ran through the city I lived in. A man started following me. He moved faster and faster. So did I. It was dark, I was scared. I tripped and fell. I don’t remember much more about it, other than his hands around my neck – interesting that that’s the one physical detail I recall so clearly. Maybe he was holding my throat so tightly that I blacked out – I’m not really sure. I do have fuzzy memories of pulling my clothes together, getting to my feet – he was nowhere in sight – going home and taking a long, long shower and throwing out the clothes I'd been wearing. My mother was away for a while on business, and so was her husband (of whom I will shortly say more), and I was alone for several days after that. I told no one for years afterward, not so much out of shame as because there was no one I could really think of to tell.

In most of these situations, no physical harm was done to me. Nonetheless, I believe all these things count as sexual violence. Certainly, the way I felt after each incident - the combination of fear, disgust and rage - wasn't all that different from how I felt the time I didn't get away. Some would probably say that's because I was stranger-raped at the age of 12, and these situations from later in my life bring back those original feelings. But I believe that words and gestures can be violent. Threatening sexual violence is an act, and a violent one.

I’m not sure that I consider child sexual abuse and sexual violence to be the same thing – or perhaps, it’s more that child sexual abuse, while never right, is not always sexual violence. Certainly, my feelings about being a survivor of sexual violence are different from my feelings about being a survivor of child sexual abuse. I remember my mother’s husband exposing himself to me, and getting me to touch him and fondle him, many times, beginning when I was seven or eight and continuing until he and my mother divorced when I was almost 13. I told no one about that for a long time, either, because even though I didn’t really like what he asked me to do, he treated me a lot better than my mother did (but that’s another story for another time). I don’t carry quite the same kinds of wounds. I think this is possibly because, twisted and sick though it was, there was an element of relationship. Sexual violence made me angry. Sexual abuse made me distrustful. Not saying one experience is any more or less harmful or wrong, just that they may sometimes have different dynamics – partly, I think, because sexual violence is power and control expressed through sexual acts, and child sexual abuse is, I think, more about sexuality expressed in a context of power, control and sometimes violence.

I wonder what it says about us as a species that sexual violence is so common among us. My guess is that, by my definitions of sexual violence, most women and at least a quarter of men are survivors of sexual violence. Sexual violence, as both an individual and a cultural means of exerting power and control and evoking fear, is directed not just at women but at sexual, ethnic and faith minorities. Wherever we look, we can find it - in homes, on battlefields, and everywhere in between.

Survivors of sexual violence have been talking about it for decades now. I know that speaking out can help the survivor to heal, and sometimes help others in their healing as well. So far, I’m not sure it’s done much to heal the human race of whatever dark knot is coiled inside, waiting for the time and place to strike. Maybe that’s just because there’s still not enough of us talking.

No Pity. No Shame. No Silence.


Addendum: It’s curious – when I began writing this entry, I considered putting some of my comments after an lj-cut, but decided not to, because concealment is so often associated with both shame and silence. I know that the cut is used for many reasons having nothing to do with concealment, and that many people will argue, with justification, that material about sexual violence could be very uncomfortable, even painful, for some. And if what I’ve written here has caused pain to anyone, I am sorry that this has happened. But I’m not ashamed about anything I’ve spoken of, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been silent about any of it. And in the current context, I think it all belonged right out front.

Ok, if you're out there, I know you're starting to think I overanalyse things, and you know, you're damned right.

But I had this notion, while answering a comment by jenwrites to my first meta-journalling post, and I wanna write about it, so there.

I wonder if I'm placing more importance on the aspect of being able to see a more multi-dimensional image of people in LJ than in other cyberfora because I'm disabled. (Note, while I have a number of medical issues, it's really only in the past two-three years that I have become severely limited in terms of mobility, so I'm still getting used to not being able to hop on a bus and go wherever I want to go.) A lot of the people I know on the internet are members of various fandoms. They meet at conventions. They know each other in a way that I probably never will.

At the same time, my own social interactions IRL have become more limited. Yes, I have lots of IRL friends with whom I carry on viable relationships, but they are kind of one-sided. I never go to their homes, because most of them live in places that I can't go to, because of one or more of my disabilities. I can't go out and do things with them. Hell, one of my best friends is an actor, and I haven't been able to get out to see her in a play for eight years now. All the physical, real-time experience of my relationships with these is centred in my apartment.

Maybe I'm struck by finding more depth in the context of my relationships with my friends in cyberspace because I feel I'm losing depth in the context of my IRL friendships.

Something to contemplate.

I originally joined LJ because a group of friends I am on a mailing list with are active LJers, and I wanted to be able to read their entries here and comment on them. What I have discovered in the process of doing so is that, at least for the frequent LJers among them, I am coming to know them from a slightly different perspective.

The list that I and they are on has no topic restrictions, and we all post everything from interesting news articles to very personal rants, fears and life issues. You might think that the perspective would be much the same as that gained from reading LJ entries. But there are interesting differences. And I am enjoying those differences. It is giving me a wider and deeper glimpse into the lives of people I've come to see as friends, even though most of us will never meet, due to distance and my travel limitations due to multiple disabilities.

Which in turn is causing me to rethink my intended use of LJ. At first, I thought that I would primarily operate in comment mode - in essence, joining into conversations with people I know, much as I would on a mailing list. However, I've begun to wonder: if I am enjoying reading about the day-to-day stuff in the journals of my friends, being even more of a voyeur into their lives, isn't it... appropriate... for me to give them the same kind of glimpse into my everyday existence?

Of course, I may be wallowing in egocentricity here - but that's one of the basic issues of living on the Net anyway. And it's an interesting one. This is, I think, the first time/place in human society (since our very early days when all the society we knew was the other folks in our little tribe) where people begin from the assumption that they have something to say to others, that they deserve the opportunity to make themselves and their views widely known. That the sum of the moments of their lives matters on a larger scale.

Which has an interesting potential for the future of our political institutions - what do governments do when all citizens begin their civic involvement with the assumption that they have a right to be seen, heard and understood as individuals, not just as slips of paper in a ballot box or fractions of a statistic from the latest opinion poll? I know, this is not a new observation, but I think it may be more of a fundamental shift in Western attitudes toward the relationship of the personal and public selves than many people are aware.

All of which, of course, may just be my elaborate justification for inflicting my personal annoyances and mundane accomplishment on the rest of you. ;-)