i’m excited to welcome Cowboy Dad to his new home on the range internet, Tales from Cowboy Dad. over there he’ll be spinning some yarns about bike tours and whatever else is on his mind, and when he’s out on the road i’ll be applying the spit and polish as your friendly cowboy kitten. mixed metaphor; maybe i’ll be plying the yarns. or something.

i hope y’all are having a beautiful summer. ♥

finding awesome places to go and going to them, and awesome things nearby:
reading frenzy
fat fancy
tender loving empire

eating delicious food:
food carts, obviously. apparently i am sandwiched between two pods, which is good because sometimes i like sandwiches.
i have been craving an eggplant parmesan sandwich, because the one at le voyeur was not the perfect delicious thing that i wanted.

the last thing i want to do in town is maybe purchase a tarot deck, if i find one i like. in searching for information on where this could happen, i came across the best melding of things i am interested in ever: dino tarot. yes.

that’s all for now: let’s go and have these adventures instead of being on the internet all day, eh? what else is amazing, portland?

my partner’s typetyping on his computer in the kitchen. unsurprisingly the last post didn’t end up manifesting exactly as we’d pictured it, but things turned out pretty swell. four of the specifics didn’t pan out, and a few of them turned out half-way… we’re on the eastside, just barely – and i’m finding that a lot of awesome folks live nearby. the outside garden space isn’t optimal, but there’s a glass room that’s serving nicely. the most surprising thing? it’s a studio. after the last studio i shared with a lover turned out badly, i promised myself i wouldn’t do that again…

god that was a trip down memory lane that i didn’t really want to take, trying to find that linked entry. anyhow, i was saying that this studio is bigger and right downtown and i have friends and transportation here, so all in all i think it’s better to have a big space of our own than a little space in a shared house, which is what we could have gotten for this much money elsewhere. rationalize. but yeah, it’s a lovely old place and there’s a giant monkey puzzle tree and a giant kitchen, where i’ve been doing lots of beautiful cooking since we have two farm shares and that’s a lot of vegetables and we don’t have much money for anything other than vegetables.

the cooking is part of working on healing is the moral of the story. i’ve been trying to make this my focus since, well, all my life, but pretty actively since the beginning of this year, but something (school, work, school and work) has always seemed to come up. since my work ended officially on sunday and i hopefully have another engagement coming up in a couple of weeks, i’m using this time to breathe breathe breathe breathe breathe and work on the self-love thing (trying to break excessive reliance on the external validation thing).

so far that has been about letting myself do mostly just things that i want to do, a little meditation with good friends and a lot of down time, which is something for which i usually judge myself very harshly. i’m trying to move in to more structured work, but don’t know what that looks like yet – we’ll see.

i’m hoping it will go well; let me know of any ideas y’all might have to help strengthen this time.

xo

here’s a list of what my partner and i are dreaming of in a living space:

• two bedrooms (or one if it’s big!)
• no housemates
• no neighbors we can hear
• preferably a house, rather than an apartment.
• outdoor-space where we can garden
• well-behaved-cat friendly
• month-to-month or six-month lease
• no active mold
• within a mile or so of an intercity transit bus line that runs until (at least) eight
• bike/pedestrian-friendly access to said bus (currently there are no shoulders or streetlights on a 50mph road)
• room to park one, maybe two cars (based on bus access)
• responsible-student friendly – we may not make three times the rent, but we will always be able to pay it.
• downtown or westside oly
• our optimal price range tops out somewhere around $800

on our end, we are…

• a graduate student and a returning evergreen ba/bs student who have been living together for a while
• a sweet and friendly orange cat (with references of his own)
• crafters makers do-ers
• extroverted in public, introverted at home
• strong believers in “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without”
• in love with our local communities

If you won’t scold and dominate us
We will never give you cause to hate us
We won’t hide your spectacles
So you can’t see
Put toads in your bed
Or pepper in your tea
Hurry nanny
Many thanks
Sincerely,
Jane and Michael Banks

i have a home to myself and am stretching out, wanting to dig my roots deep even if that’s not the most wise plan possible. i want to stretch my limbs and cross-pollinate, growing my community and my family.

i’m baffled by how much work that can take, hyperaware of how the ten miles i live from town can seem like a day’s journey. but i’m trying to strengthen and grow.

this next quarter i’m just taking one class, using the rest of that time to store up my resources. i’ve made it through the winter into a time of rebirth, but i need to actually pay attention if anything sustainable is going to happen.

last year choir sang along with some songs that the bundles were recording, and now you can listen to them through the magic of c.d. or on white vinyl! i haven’t picked a favorite yet, but i’m really into “desert bundles” at the moment. …which you can conveniently listen to here!

photo (of some of us) by berd!

i’ve been a little into reclaiming the bible lately. i’m pretty much an agnostic pagan nutjob, but when the bible isn’t being used to hurt people or take money from folks, it can be pretty wise. i’m learning the way that all those strange numbers tell you where you are, which makes them a lot less confusing.

we went to church with my (lutheran) grandmother this sunday, and the sermon was about unconditional love, which is something i can get behind. at choir last week i went and talked to a man who had peeked his head in and listened for a while, usually i invite them in to sing with us. trying to figure out who we were, he asked “is this church?!” …i didn’t really know how to respond. for me, the love that we bring to choir *is* religion.

so, 1 Corinthians 12:14-26. it begins (14-17):

Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?

it seems like this has been interpreted a lot around different religions being part of the church, but if you’re going to tell me that there’s nothing in the bible about the gays or what have you, i’m going to point you here. this is accepting everybody as they are, not kicking them out for being different than you are.

remember in april when i was freaking out about not being a part of my community? i still get frazzled about it, which is part of why i was excited about corinthians. above talks about folks not detaching, not isolating themselves for their differences, but look at what 21-26 says about taking care of the parts “that seem to be weaker:”

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

i’m excited here about a lot of things, about not throwing people out. about questioning our judgment of “honor” and what’s “unpresentable.” maybe the bible *does* want us to be socialist freaks, or maybe we should just take care of each other.

as the minister tried to get at unconditional love, something seemed to come up to the congregation about fear, fear of some kind of responsibility or catch to this unconditionality. this culture of fear is pervasive, and i think that the only way to work on it is by loving big. you wanna help?

a nineteen-year-old from puerto rico was horribly murdered last week. the above statement was from the local police investigator assigned to the case.

nobody deserves that treatment, that bias. but the sentiment happens world-wide.

it’s the trans day of remembrance.

this is the eleventh year of transfolks worldwide making a conscious effort to get together on the same day and remember their dead.

too many people are killed, (unsurprisingly) skewed largely toward transwomen of color.

there are vigils today, yeah, you can vigil at home, but to me this is a day to be with your people and love them,

and then think about who aren’t your people.

who’s not with you? how can you expand your world to include everybody? how can we work together to stop folks from slipping through the cracks?

i’m caught between an idealistic “don’t ever let your posse be alone” with a feminist “i should be able to be alone if i fucking want to.” how can we unite those concepts by making the streets safe for everyone?

gender jam is this weekend, but that kind of space needs to be available to folks always. how can we create immediate support while still maintaining hope and building toward long-term change?

three things for you to work on tonight: light a candle. change the world. keep breathing.

election day marked a year of choir, in which it has grown exponentially in awesomeness and more than doubled in the amount of time we meet each week. yesterday was kimya’s birthday, and she was super sick. she requested that her friends post videos of themselves singing soft rock, but instead of soft rock i decided to have choir work on a response to this new song of hers… we recorded it and i made it into a moving picture (which is going to break my layout, apparently).

this weekend is gender jam: olympia’s 2009 lad.i.y. and trans fest. i’m greatly anticipating many of the awesome workshops (nat and i are taking our little brother to chelsea baker‘s “comics aren’t just for boys” workshop – it’s one of chelsea’s comics that closes out the video), and then sunday’s free choir practice is going to be part of gender jam as well, from four to six, in fertile ground guesthouse‘s living room. it’d be a great first visit to choir, if you’ve been holding back – there should be lots of other new folks too, and we’re focusing on making sure that everybody is able to feel super welcome.

i hadn’t actually spend much time with seahorses before i had them tattooed on my leg, so it was nice that i had a chance to see some at the birch aquarium. the aquarium itself i didn’t like as much as the california academy of sciences‘ setup of fishyness, but the academy only had dead seahorses, so i maybe cried a little bit. until i wandered into the penguin room where they were feeding the penguins.

but the birch aquarium. seahorses that are alive, yes. a big porcupine pufferfish, yes. mostly, though, the baaaaby seahorses pictured (and titular). so small, two inches or so from head to tail-tip, they made the bumbling adult seahorses look positively graceful. the babies had managed to get tangled up when we first found them, but eventually unlinked themselves (i think they designed monkeys in a barrel after seahorses) and started bobbing around, upside-down and sideways. i love them.

other than the seahorses and the faux otka (r.i.p. real otka), the aquarium was just so-so. but there were four separate tanks with seahorses in them, so it was a worthwhile trip all-in-all.