Pictonaut June 2014: Them Apples

It's been a while since I last came poking around this blog. I'm dusting it off for a good cause though. My friend John, the Rogue Verbumancer still persists in his noble Pictonaut quest. Every month he posts a picture and writes a thousand or so words of short story based on that picture. Sometimes, I manage to join him in that noble quest.

This months picture is called Them Apples. This is what I wrote.

Them Apples

Everyone knows the story of Snow White. Or at least, some variation on the story. There's always an evil queen who is jealous of the unsurpassed beauty of the titular princess. There's usually a huntsman tasked with killing the princess out in the woods and there are almost always dwarves. The queen poisons Snow White who falls into an enchanted sleep only to be awoken by a kiss from her one true love. Snow White and her charming Prince live happily ever after. Blah blah blah, yuck. The story always, always ends with the gruesome and justly deserved death of the evil queen. Every single version of the story.

Every single version of the story is wrong.

It's not surprising that the fairy tales we teach our children overlook the tiny detail of the Queen's true fate. I mean, most of the stories don't even bother to tell you her name. Regina. Her name is Regina. And do you seriously think that a woman capable of plotting and scheming her way to power would be brought low by a vapid teenager and her entourage of vertically challenged minions?

No. 

In the true story, Queen Regina survives.

Oh she is undoubtedly changed by her ordeal; it wouldn't be a very good story if our characters weren't changed somehow. At the end of Snow White's story our Queen is still alive, but trapped in the form of the old woman who delivered Snow White the poisoned apple.

It took all of her considerable cunning to escape the combined wrath of the dwarves, but she managed it. She hid in the woods for months, eating rotten fruit and raw fish. At night she slept under the stars, no matter the weather. She almost froze to death on a number of occasions. The experience humbled her.

It quickly became obvious that she couldn't return to her throne in her current form. She was no longer a contender for the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, no matter what they say about the eye of the beholder. And she had learned her lesson with regards to Snow White; she vowed to stay as far away from that troublesome wretch as she possibly could. Her schemes had been thwarted, her goals were out of reach and her throne had no doubt been usurped. There was only one path left open to her; to regain her true self at any cost.

The quest was not undertaken lightly; the magics involved in transforming a person's form are powerful and deadly. Regina had been weakened by her flight from the dwarves and stay in the forest and could no longer summon the required power. So she had to be patient.

Eventually, she stumbled upon a village whose inhabitants took pity on her. They fed her, clothed her and provided a hot bath. One of the villagers let her stay in their stable because she reminded them of their grandmother. Regina was profoundly grateful for the villagers' kindness. In return she cast a spell to ensure their crop would be good and their livestock healthy. That small spell cost her most of the magic reserves she had left, but she didn't mind the setback.

So it went for Regina; she would travel from village to village trading small items or simple spells for food and board. She knew that if she kept using her magic at this rate she would never be able to summon enough power to returned to her previous form. But she also knew that her magic was one of the few things she had left to trade, and she would never regain her throne if she starved to death.  Simple patience would not restore her powers, but Regina knew that there were immense resources of magic in the world if one knew where to look. Wherever she went on her travels, she kept an ear out for rumours of such sources of power, for they were her only hope of returning to herself.

Eventually she passed out of reckoning. The world moved on, new kings and queens rose and fell. People assumed that Queen Regina the Evil had simply perished. They got on with their lives, completely oblivious to the truth. But you can never completely kill a legend.

There are rumours that the evil queen still wanders the lands even today, kept alive by malice and sheer force of will. Neither Heaven nor Hell will accept her, and so she lingers on this mortal plane, ever searching for the key to her salvation. One day, perhaps she will find the source of power she longs for and the Evil Queen will return to enact her vengeance on the world. Perhaps.

The rumours say that her wandering days are over, and that she now prefers to stay in one place, selling apples as she once did to Snow White. The redder the apple, the better. So be wary, fellow travellers, of old women offering you apples as red as blood.

It could be poisoned.

Jamibu: One Year On

Today is the first anniversary of the death of my friend Jamibu.

I wrote some words at the time, and lamented the fact I couldn’t seem to find any that were appropriate. It’s been a year, and it hasn’t gotten any easier. The words don’t come any easier, it’s no easier to think about him and the tears are just as likely to fall now as they were a year ago. The pain is still just as keen. I honestly have no idea how his family are feeling; I lost my friend, but they lost a brother, a son. All I can say is my thoughts are with them.

Today feels poignant; we have come to the end of all the firsts. First birthday, first Christmas, that sort of thing. After today, everything will be seconds, and those seconds will become thirds. I think this is the point at which its supposed to get easier. I don’t think it ever will.

It’s funny, the things that have caused me to think of him, the things that have hurt most. Watching Doctor Who without him, without being able to discuss it afterwards. Feeling sad when I think about how much he would have loved the Avengers movie. When I listen to a song by one of the bands we saw together. When I got a new phone, my first instinct was to ask Jamibu what he thought, but I couldn’t. I miss his puns. They were utterly awful, but I miss them, and other people making puns can make me sad.

These things may seem trivial. But that’s how people get woven into our lives; a million and one mundane things. One day you realise that you have so many silly little things shared with this person that they are a part of you. And Jamibu was a part of me, and a part of me died when he did. But if Jamibu was a part of me, then I was a part of him too, and as such he lives on. He was part of so many people’s lives that in many ways he is still with us. Instead of having our real and proper Jamibu, we have a sort of crowdsourced Jamibu, made up of the memories and emotions of a hundred people. As long as we remember him, he will remain. As long as it hurts, we can’t forget.

My friend John has expressed a worry that if the pain of loss ever goes away he will forget Jamibu. Myself, I’m not worried about forgetting him; I had his name etched onto my skin for a reason. But I am glad to have so many photos, particularly on Facebook. It gives me a way to remember. If I find myself forgetting his smile I can always find a photo. There are things I have already forgotten about him, and things I have yet to forget. But no matter how much I forget, he will never completely leave me. My life was irrevocably changed by both the life and death of this man. And that matters, that will always matter.

I think about him often. I wonder what he would have thought about this tv show or that book. I wonder what he would have thought about my stupid new hair. Would he have had any advice for me as I bumble through my PhD? I feel guilty whenever I struggle with my research; he kept going through all his illness, with barely a tenth of the complaining I've done. And for those who didn’t know, he did get his PhD in the end. Jamibu graduated in December; Dr Bullock. I spent much of that day in tears.

Far too soon we will mark the second anniversary of his death, and then the third and so on. At some point he will have been gone longer than I knew him in the first place. But I will always remember him. I may never have the words to express how I feel, or what he still means to me, at least not coherently. But I will keep him in my thoughts and in my heart.

Rest in awesome Jamibu.

Dr James Bullock, and someone who wants to be half the person he was.

Happy Societally Approved Day of Romance Designed to Part You and Your Money

I don't know if you'd noticed, but today is Valentine's Day. Congratulations if you were unaware of this, you may have been living on Mars or under a rock (I hope the former because Mars is way cooler than a rock). Yes today is our societal approved capitalist wankfest in celebration of one particular expression of romantic love. But I hear you cry, "why are you so disdainful of this holiday? You have a romantic partner, surely today is all cuddles and kittens".

It is true enough that I have a romantic partner and that means today is all about him and me and snuggles and stuff. Except that its not. It is about parting people from their hard earned money so they can make a big show of how much they supposedly love their partner. When, you know, money and love shouldn't have anything to do with each other and if you're only showing your partner you love them once a year, you are doing it so very wrong.

This is the fifth concurrent year that Sam and I have been together for Valentine's day. And yet, I am still in a position where I have been single for more Valentine's days than I have had a partner. And one of the Valentine's days spent with someone was so horrifically disappointing its a wonder I didn't become a nun. So  I am still kind of suffering from the social conditioning that Valentine's day must be perfect or you don't love that person enough. But I am also coming to realise after five years with the same person, five iterations of Valentine's day in this relationship, that it's all a bunch of crap. And the socially conditioned view of romance is also crap. I'm still in an in between phase, realising that today has no intrinsic meaning, but not quite able to let go of the idea we have to mark it. Perhaps one day I'll be able to wake up on February 14th and honestly not give a shit about the cuddly toys and plastic hearts. But today is not yet that day.

So we will be celebrating Valentine's day with some traditionally romantic gestures. Yes, we will be eating dinner at a restaurant. But that's partly about marking the passage of time; we're eating at the same restaurant we went to for our first Valentine's day together. Yes, I got Sam a heart. Sort of. [EDIT: link appears to be dead, so here's a picture]. But in return he got me a meat thermometer, because I've been wanting one, and the promise of a decent slab of beef to go with it. And we actually exchanged gifts before today, because the day itself is not intrinsically special. There is nothing intrinsically special about V-day and all it's trapping. Thought I do believe there is something special about mine and Sam's relationship.

That said, my relationship with Sam isn't special because he buys me flowers and we stare into each other's eyes over a candlelit dinner. Neither of which happens all that often. As Girl on the Net said, love is in the mundane. My relationship with Sam is special because he trusts me with a sharp implement on his face; because he doesn't mind when I walk around the house with my wobbly bits out; because he is willing to put up with my heinous farts. That's what is special about our relationship, because we only have those things with each other. But it doesn't sound romantic, right? Well, in my experience love and romance often have very little to do with each other.

It is going to be incredibly difficult to spend the rest of your life with a person based on romantic gestures like flowers and chocolates and sensual massages. The real foundations for sharing your life with another person are decidedly unromantic. It's all about putting up with each others' idiosyncrasies, sorting out who does the dishes without murdering each other and being able to laugh at each others, especially if you fart at an inopportune moment.

While we're on the subject of love and squishy things, I read this yesterday. Apparently, according to some researcher or other, online relationships aren't' "real" relationships. I take issue with this on a non-romantic level. I have many friends that I know solely in an online capacity. And you know what? Some of them are better friends than those who are ostensibly my "real" friends. When I'm felling shitty, I've had more support from people I've never met in Australia that I have had from friends I grew up with. So I take issue with the idea that online friendships aren't "real"; I take issue at the divide between online life and "real" life.

And yes, the internet did play a vital role in Sam and I getting together. While we met in real life first, social media was where everything took off. We "poked" each other on Facebook, which led to using the "Superpoke" app to broaden out to "holding hands". When we exhausted the capabilities of that app, we moved on to "sexy" poking each other. This led to Facebook messaging, which led to talking on MSN for hours at a time. This all culminated in a highly orchestrated drinking "competition" which we knew Sam was going to lose and was a thinly veiled pretext for kisses without awkwardness. Except Sam ruined all of the careful planning by asking me out before the date of the drinking competition and by kissing me before the appointed time.

And yes, he asked me out online. Which actually led to a hilarious incident that wouldn't have happened offline. Literally seconds after he'd asked me on a date, my computer crashed. While I was frantically trying to reset my computer he was thinking I'd signed out of the messenger in disgust at being asked out by him. Thankfully, my computer rebooted alright, I signed back in and accepted his offer of a date. The rest, as they say is history.

Were it not for these interactions, the start of our relationship would have been significantly delayed, if it had ever happened at all. If we had gotten together anyway, it's possible we wouldn't have lasted as long as we had without that no pressure period of communication that allowed us to get to know each other pretty well before we started anything. So please don't dismiss relationships formed online as somehow "less" or not "real".

Because the farts Sam has to put up with are very definitely real, and are a much better measure of love than any number of bouquets of flowers.

Thoughts on Marriage

I wrote this a while ago, but since today is the Parliamentary "debate" on whether to "allow" same-sex couples to get married, I thought I'd post it. It's a stream of consciousness piece that is largely unedited.

I welcome attempts to create a more equal state of marriage than currently exists, after all if it exists then everyone should have the right to it. That is the basic way equality works. Setting aside for the moment that the proposed new legislation still throws a whole bunch of relationships under the bus, I want to explain why I am against marriage for me. I have no desire to get married myself, even though as a person in a heterosexual relationship I have that right already.

I do not want to get married because I see marriage as an outdated institution wrapped up in a whole bunch of problematic misogynistic, patriarchal and religious bullcrap that I don’t agree with. I don’t subscribe to a model of adulthood that includes marriage as a rite of passage or a marker of success and I don’t want the role of wife. I don’t want to be a wife and I don’t want to have a husband. I want my relationship to be as authentic as possible, as innovative as it can be and as true to who my partner and I are as people as we can manage. I am not interested in the cookie cutter ideal of what heterosexual relationships should be like, and that is what I feel is offered by marriage.

I don’t want to make a sacrament with God, and I certainly don’t want to invite the government into my relationship if at all possible. At a legal level, what marriage boils down to is having a certificate from the government saying that your relationship is sanctioned, it’s a proper relationship and better than other people’s. I would rather see the whole institution abolished so we can remove this discrimination against unmarried couples like myself, we who do not have ‘proper’ and officially sanctioned relationships. But that is unlikely to happen, and while ever it does exist I have as much right to decide not to get married as I do to get married. Other people don’t have that choice; it has been taken away from them. By denying certain people the right to marriage the government are essentially saying that some relationships can never be considered legitimate. And while I would prefer a system wherein all relationships are considered legitimate and equal because we have abolished the two tier system marriage creates, that is unlikely to happen any time soon. Therefore the only possible course of action, the one that ensures true equality is to offer marriage to people in every kind of consenting adult relationship. Giving same-sex couples the right to marry is just the first step along this road.

Thursday Poem: Ode to the Colour Yellow

This morning I asked Sam what I could do today to decrease World suck. He suggested I should write a poem, so I did.

I don't do this very often, so please excuse my rhymes.

I found something yellow and cheery

Ode to the Colour Yellow

Oh Yellow! You most underused of colours,

When choosing my clothes I invariably reach for others,

Day after day I hear you cry,

Why other colours, why?

Why not me? Have I offended you in some way?

Did I upset your mother in some sort of way?

I have to answer in the negative when I reply,

Truth be told I am not quite sure why,

When I think of colours I choose the opposite of you,

For a long time now black has been my favourite hue.

Perhaps it is because you are bright and happy,

I’ve never like to draw people’s attention to me.

Perhaps it is simply because I am scared

Of drawing attention and peoples stares,

What might they say? What might they do?

The questions cause concern it is true.

But that is no reason for you to be so neglected,

While other colours in the spectrum are more respected.

I know I should reconsider my choices,

And think of all the other colours which lack voices,

I cannot promise that I will bedeck myself in bright shades,

My current habits have been formed now for decades,

But I can promise that I will try,

And think upon the reason why,

I choose to blend in instead of stand out in a crowd,

Why I choose to be subdued instead of shouting out loud,

And I will think of you, oh beautiful yellow,

When I choose my wardrobe shades more mellow,

And once in a very small while,

I’ll allow you to make me smile.

A Samhain Message

A Personal Perspective on the New Emergency Contraceptive Pill

The Telegraph has a piece up at the moment discussing a new form of emergency contraception that can be taken up to five days after sex. I'm not going to link the article, partly because I don't like the Telegraph, but mostly because the tone of the piece is simply horrific. It's incredibly anti-woman and sees women who don't want to become pregnant as simply 'unwilling mothers'. I'm not linking to a piece that thinks that I'm simply a walking uterus waiting to be impregnated.

Much of the text is provided over at Forty Shades of Grey, and Nat Fantastic does an excellent job of covering the main problems with the piece, so I'm not going to recover any of that ground. What I want to do is provide some personal perspective as someone who has made use of the existing 72 hour form of emergency contraception.

I have used the emergency contraceptive pill a grand total of once in my life. I didn't use it as my only form of contraception, though I am certainly not condemning people who choose to do that. I want to use my personal story as a springboard for looking at why I think the availability of emergency contraception is an excellent idea in general, and why this new pill is a positive step forward.

I was in my first year at university, and in a relationship that was still relatively new. We had used a condom, but it had come off at some point during sex. My boyfriend and I thought that the condom had done its job, but didn't want to leave it up to chance. Neither of us were willing to wait until I either had my period or didn't to find out if we were right. So we made the decision to seek emergency contraception. The incident happened on a Sunday, so we knew we had to find somewhere that would give it over the counter. We checked our local pharmacies, but they either weren't open, didn't stock the pill or the pharmacist wasn't working that day. Fortunately we were pointed in the direction of a pharmacy that would be able to provide the pill.

Even though both my boyfriend and I were under 25 and we were both students and there are supposed to be various schemes for providing emergency contraception for free, we still had to pay full price. Still had to fill out forms and I still had to sit through a mini-consultation, which for the record was awkward as hell, before we could get what we were after. Even after taking the pill, and knowing that we'd obtained it well within the 72 hour period its effective, I was still utterly terrified I might still be pregnant. Things didn't get easier until after I got my period.

According to the excuse for a human being who wrote the article in the Telegraph I shouldn’t have had access to that contraception. I should have waited until the date of my next period to find out what had happened. And if I had been so unlucky as to get pregnant, I should have carried that pregnancy to term. No choice about what happens to my body.

What strikes me about the writer of this article, and pro-lifers in general, is that there's so much they don't care about. They make big noises about the sanctity of life and the rights of the foetus, but I don't hear any of that. I just hear a whole lot of "I don't give a shit".

What I hear is "I don't care about women's bodily autonomy; I don't care about their right to choose what happens to  their lives". Take my hypothetical pregnancy scenario. These people who believe in the foetus above all don't care about my education. They don't care what I had planned for my life. They don't care if I want kids at all, or if I'd just rather have them later. They don't care what kind of relationship I have with my boyfriend, whether it is stable enough to handle a pregnancy or a child; whether the relationship is intended to be serious and long term. They don't care if me and my partner are ready to be parents, or even want to be at all. They don't care whether or not we want children with each other, now or in the future. They don't care if we have the financial stability to support a child, or a support network of family of friends.

And while I know that they don't care about me, or what I want or what my rights are, I don't think pro-lifers actually care about the embryo/foetus/child either.

If they did, they would see that there are many many situations where it would not be good to bring a child into the world. If my relationship with my boyfriend were not stable, and I was not prepared to be a single mother, that would not be a good scenario to bring a child into. If we had no means of supporting a child, financially, emotionally, either ourselves or with the help of friends and family, that would not be a good scenario to bring a child into. It feels like pro-lifers never take this into consideration. The idea that a pregnancy should be carried to term no matter the life that the resulting child will be brought into says to me that these people are in fact pro-pregnancy, not necessarily pro-life. As a person who is in possession of both a life and a uterus, I find it extremely disturbing that there are people who think the rights of a tiny collection of cells or a proto-person should be held in higher regard than mine. Who is pro- my life?

And to those people who suggest giving a child up to adoption, you're no better. You aren't taking into consideration the approximately nine months between conception and birth that I would have to deal with against my will. In addition, it doesn't take into account the birth itself, which no matter which method of giving birth is used, is likely to be traumatic to a person who never wanted to be pregnant in the first place. To me, the issues of not wanting to be a parent and not wanting to be pregnant or give birth are separate but related.  Suggesting adoption as the solution not only erases that fact, but also erases the potential emotional trauma to the mother and potentially the child.

Emergency contraception is another tool that people, particularity women have at their disposal to prevent unwanted pregnancies and hence unwanted children. It is another tool which helps give women in particular more control over their bodies and their lives. Which I suspect is really the thing that scares pro-lifers.

The introduction of this new 5-day later pill is only a good thing as far as I'm concerned, and I wish it had been available when I used the 72 hour pill. If there had been nowhere in my area that sold the 72 hour pill over the counter, I would have had to wait until Monday morning to make a doctors appointment. This would already be nearly 24 hours after the condom failure; if they couldn’t fit me in Monday or Tuesday, then the 72 hour pill would have been of no use to me by the time I could take it. If the accident had occurred on Saturday, my time scale would have contracted still further.

The availability of the 72 hour emergency contraceptive is a useful fall back method, and the 5 day pill even more so. It gives you another fall-back to prevent pregnancy occurring before the question becomes one of carrying to term or having an abortion. The more tools at our disposal, the more empowered we are.

According to Twitter, the Daily Mail is calling the new pill the "promiscuity pill".  There is this idea that providing more contraceptive choices is going to make people more promiscuous. Aside from the assumption that promiscuity is inherently bad, in my experience that just isn't true. Some people will be promiscuous, some people won't. Offering more contraceptive choices simply allows both sets of people more control over their lives, whatever they choose to do with them.

There also seems to be this idea that in principle the emergency contraceptive pill is fine, but some people have a problem with it being used "incorrectly" i.e. as a primary form of contraception. I have several problems with people wanting to police how the emergency contraceptive pill is used. Firstly, it stems from the idea that we should be policing bodies, women's bodies in particular. To me this says "we'll give you this new way to control when you get pregnant, but you can only have it if you use it how we (usually men) want you to use it." That smacks of patriarchy and isn't empowering to women, nor is it a positive force in their lives. Secondly, while I am aware that emergency contraception is intended to be used in cases where primary contraception has failed or was unavailable, if people choose to use it as a primary contraceptive, that is their right. There are many reasons why what we other forms of contraception weren't used at the time sex occurred, some of which include rape and/or abuse. I fully believe that instead of judging people for using emergency contraception "incorrectly" we should be looking at the reasons why this is their chosen form of contraception. Is it a matter of education, or is there something else at work here? My final problem with this is what happens when I follow this line of thought to its conclusion. Do you know where I end up? At the notion that the majority should have their access to this form of healthcare withdrawn because a minority can’t be trusted to use it "properly". I have many problems with this idea, not least the idea that we shouldn't be trusting people with what happens to their own bodies.

I want to say a few things in conclusion. I think that people who own penises should butt out, or at the very least focus their attention more on the fact that a penis-owning person is usually also involved in the process of making pregnancies happen. I'm fed up of people without uteruses approaching this discussion from a hypothetical  moral viewpoint and ignoring the real lived experiences of people who have been directly affected by these issues. I'm fed up of penis owning people thinking that their opinion on this issue is somehow more important or more valid that the opinions or feelings of a person with a uterus. That needs to stop. I also think that we should be less concerned with some people using this form of contraception in a way that some other people think is incorrect; we should be far more concerned about what led them to using this contraception this way, and if there is action that can be taken to help those people, we should take it.

Finally, I believe that we should be providing healthcare such as the emergency contraceptive pill as widely as possible, and trusting people to make their own decisions about how they use it. And we should stop thinking that's such a radical notion.



Postscript: while I am aware that uterus-owning is not a club all women are in, nor is it a women only club, I am a woman with a uterus and can only speak from the perspective of a uterus-owning women. I don't mean to erase non-uterus owning women, nor uterus-owning men from this picture, but since I am neither I do not feel comfortable speaking about their experiences with regards to contraception. I have tried as best I can to not make the assumption that women and uterus-owning people are the same thing. If I messed up, please let me know and I'll correct it.