Pride Week 2009 recap (non-chronological)

i'm spending the morning writing things i can't decide if i want to post.

i haven't even gotten to my paper journal all week.
this tends to prompt writing-about-writing....meta-writing, if you will.
(i love the 'meta-' prefix, and want to use it for everything.)

it's been a busy week, and a lot has happened. one does not necessarily mean the other.

i wrote about drag the first time i performed, and i haven't written about it here since. it's funny, reading over it, to see how my perceptions have changed. in that entry, i write about "becoming someone other than yourself," and on thursday night, i made a point of telling an audience of probably upwards of 400 people that "i'm not impersonating anybody--i'm up here trying to express another part of myself." which, i suppose, is what drag really means to me now....but i've become a big fan of the notion that "all gender is drag." my gender, especially. i wrote somewhere else recently that i am androgynous, so my drag is either end of the [gender] spectrum. it was weird--i was kinging on thursday night, so friday i dressed femme, to get some of the balance back, and i did kinda feel like i was in drag (or at least giving a performance) then too.

i've also changed a lot as a writer in the last two years, i think. at least here.

tuesday night, i had the good fortune to see alix olson perform. she's pretty cool. and she has amazing energy. and i can't remember the name of the piece that almost made me cry. i'm not sure i'm supposed to. but it's funny how touch works, and how it seems we so often can't use it when we want (need?) to most. decompression with tea after that performance was wonderful....i don't think i can read all the things that are happening around me right now.

that paragraph was delightfully cryptic, wasn't it? ;)

monday night, a bunch of us college-aged queers got together and played dodgeball, and it's fascinating how something that's so terrifying when you're a kid can be so much fun once you've grown into yourself, once you've really learned what they try to teach you forever: it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, as long as you're having fun. and oh, man, was that a blast!

friday night at the club--and before going to the club, for that matter--was a pretty awesome experience actually. it was, as predicted drunkenly beforehand, a good night. there are probably too many things i could say about that, and not all of them belong here.

back to the notion of gender as performance: it was fun to sit on the bus counting the "socially acceptable" things being done by a drunken girl--things she probably didn't even realize she was doing. wearing makeup. carrying a purse. wearing a skirt. keeping her hair long. when the female sex meets a feminine gender, nobody even notices. "we think too much."

i'm pretty sure i want to shave my head again this summer.

final note: one of my Deaf teachers told me i need to go to the michigan womyn's festival sometime in my life and watch the ASL interpreters, because lesbian interpreters make the most beautiful signs. (and apparently when straight women interpret for lesbians, they're awkward.)