I've got your parade right here!

So I snuck onto twitter today, and the big trend, as if we have nothing more pressing to worry about, was #HeterosexualPrideDay.  As a heterosexual myself, I obviously don't have any hard feelings toward people who are happy about being straight.  Enjoy it!  Have fun!  The thing is, I don't believe for a second that whatever troll came up with the idea of "Heterosexual Pride Day" (or any of the disturbing number of people who picked it up and ran with it) actually had that in mind.  What could the purpose of it be, honestly?  Most people who are straight don't even think about being straight.  They've never been persecuted for it.  No one ever stopped them from getting married or adopting children or visiting their partners in the hospital.  They never had to fight for these basic rights tooth and nail, only to have a large proportion of the population bitch about the times they happened to win.   When was the last time a straight boy's parents sent him to conversion therapy to try to make him gay or a pastor advised a struggling teen that being straight was a sinful lifestyle choice and she should repent and become a lesbian?   Ever hear anyone say, "I don't care if you date the opposite sex, but you don't have to do it in PUBLIC!"?  Me neither.  I'm an open minded person, and if my fellow straights have any legitimate grievances about which awareness needs be raised, I'm willing to listen.  I just can't begin to imagine what they'd be.  "Not being allowed to abuse minorities with impunity anymore" doesn't count.  

In the absence of a genuine ax to grind with society, then, why would anyone suggest a day for promoting heterosexual pride?  We all know the answer, though far too few are willing to admit it.  When a member of a privileged majority proposes an event like this, it's almost always in direct response to a marginalized group that tries to make itself heard.   There were no MRAs before women's lib and no moans about the lack of an organization for the advancement of whites before there was an NAACP.  In just the same way, no one would think of celebrating heterosexual pride if there were no gay pride festivities.  It's not really about celebrating straightness.  It's about getting back at minorities who we know very well are continuing to fight for a voice in our society.   It's an excuse for people who are afraid of losing power to thumb their noses at groups who are gaining ground and then play dumb.  I see the protests all the time from my fellow cis heterosexual internet denizens:  "But, this is special treatment and you wanted EQUALITY!"  Anyone who stands back and takes an objective look at the situation can see that the desired social equality has not yet been achieved in this case.  Try re-reading the paragraph above if you disagree.  LGBTQ persons continue to have legitimate reason for a special positive celebration of identity and for drawing attention to the important disparities that still exist. #HeterosexualPride is just another way of denying or making light of the problems that Pride Month was intended to address.  In summary, #HeterosexualPrideDay is "not necessarily homophobic" like the Tuna KKK's Whitest Christmas Ever was "not necessarily racist."  

Now, I have to make a confession.  I don't look at homosexual couples the same way I look at straight couples, either.   While I'm not THAT old, where and when I was raised, it was rare to see these people for who they were.  They were forced to hide and live a lie and hope that no one figured them out.   So, when I see them walking down the street holding hands or pushing a stroller, or having a romantic dinner, my spirits are lifted in an unusual way.  I think to myself how wonderful it is that people who once had to deny themselves daily can be free to express their love and live openly, and I smile to myself about the bit of progress that has come about in my lifetime.   (I realize it's all relative, of course. There are still so many places and situations where LGBTQ persons cannot be themselves, and their hard won liberties in our country remain at peril.)  This is well intended, but I recognize that it's still an outmoded pattern of thinking, rooted in a place that time should have forgotten.  I hope that a day will come when, instead of grinning (or grimacing, or gasping) at seeing a same sex couple pass by, we all just move along as though we've seen nothing out of the ordinary.  Because we haven't.  When we get to that place, where there are no special reactions and no raised eyebrows, when all couples are just couples, and all families are just families, when people of all genders and sexual orientations can live fully as who they are without ever having to consider the possibility of being beaten up, deprived of their social support systems or charged with crimes as a result, then maybe we can start debating about who gets more parades. Sound fair? 

In the meantime, if you want to know where straight people's parade is...Macy's puts on a great one at Thanksgiving, and there's the Tournament of Roses, Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's day, May Day, 4th of July, and every state and county fair. I hear that Main Street electrical one at Disney Land is pretty good, too.  Enjoy. 

Electrons

Turn around.
Turn around.
Let me see your face.

Tell me if it's real or just
a desperate mind's creation.

I've been sleeping in with my
divine hallucination.

What was once exciting, utile
and so comfortable
now has become commonplace and
lets the pain seep through.  

When the shifting phase disrupts
your orbit once again,
will you drift away just like you used to do? 

Come inside.
Come inside,
to this vacuum space.  

Shades of past and future fly
through us til we awaken. 

Confidence in reason and
my senses has been shaken. 

In the sound and light from moments
spent so long ago, 
I stretch out to find my place and
get my message through. 

When the shifting phase disrupts
my orbit once again,
will I drift away just like I used to do? 

Scrambled words on posters,
feathers on roller coasters,
smiling fools and screaming ghouls
with shallow soulless eyes,
deserts filled with flowers,
deep space flights in hours,
telepathic tête-à-têtes
are somehow no surprise. 

Take my hand.
Take my hand.
Let me leave this place.

Distilling down to you, we'll
split up this amalgamation. 

Get your head in order first.
Don't storm out in frustration.

Let it be cathartic, peaceful
and so comfortable.
If it turns out commonplace, we'll
dream up something new. 

When the shifting phase disrupts
your orbit once again,
will you drift away just like you used to do? 
 

Incantation #14

Remember me sweetly.
Remember me as a friend.
I love you, and you can depend on me.
I'll be here until the last no matter how long. 

When the value of dreams is questioned,
When you wonder if you're enough,

When the essence of you is doubted,
When your fire meets a cold rebuff,

When your sleepless nights are too quiet,
When the sunrise screams in your head,

When the one-way road appears endless,
When it flings you backward instead,

When the typhoon sinks your weary ship,
When the harbor is not a home,

When this offer sounds like a bargain,
When you don't want to be alone,

remember me sweetly.
Remember me as a friend.
I love you, and you can depend on me.
I'll be here until the last, no matter how long.

The early bored special

My ride this morning was scheduled with the same service that picked me up from Heathrow nearly a month ago.  Because they were 40 minutes late last time, I booked for 10:30, to give myself plenty of time to get a backup taxi if they didn't show and still make it through the airport rigmarole.  This time, however, they showed up half an hour early, which sent me scrambling to get myself together before my 15 minutes of complimentary wait time were spent.   I was allowed to check my bag in nearly 5 hours early, and sent through a special security line where hardly anyone was waiting, even though expedited screening has never been less necessary.   My purse was pulled aside for a pocket sized bottle of hand sanitizer which I've taken through TSA at least twice before (while my carry on, which contained a similar but fuller bottle, whizzed right through), but I was still inside the terminal well over 4 hours before my flight time.  With no gate assignment to guide me, I retreated, again, to the club lounge, where I now find myself.  There are no privacy walls between the seats here at LHR, but there is space, quiet, a soft chair, password protected wifi, and a much larger number of lavatories per capita.  They seem to be playing an old Café del Mar compilation I've often heard on repeat in places that are intended to be perceived as swanky, which is amusing in a way, but not unpleasant.  If I must be in an airport for 3 more hours, it's better for everyone involved if I spend it hiding here, with my diet soda and chocolate eggs.

Walk this way

For most of the day, in spite of actively looking for motivation, I could not gather the desire to stir from the hotel.  I slept for several hours after breakfast, went to afternoon tea served by the hotel in honor of the queen's birthday, puttered around on the internet in search of things worth going out for, reorganized my luggage, and returned to the dinner buffet, quite nearly as ravenous as I'd been this morning.

After eating thousands of calories and sitting for hours killing time, I finally just put on my coat, went outside and walked.   I walked with no destination in mind, meandering through the streets, turning toward things that looked interesting and then, having investigated to my satisfaction turned back again.   I walked at my own pace and with my own purpose, in just the way I'd always wanted to travel before self doubt induced me to book a tour and be led about by others at a breakneck pace from dawn until the witching hour every day.

I mulled over my experiences of the past few weeks, where I'd been, what I'd seen and done.  Much of my misery, it seems, has been induced by my lack of control over my situation.  It's not the places, the people, the hotels or even my illness, as much as how little say I had in how my problems were managed.  At home, I am the master of my own destiny.   I spend 8-ish hours at work, for no more than 5 days in a row, and then I come and go as I please.  If I'm sick, I call in and stay put and sleep.   I take road trips when I want to, and I decide how often to stop and get out of the car.   I can choose my own recreational activities and I can keep the company I want rather than being thrown together with an ill-fitting crowd of people and having to get along.  This trip was more like a mobile workplace, three straight weeks of a job with no days off, where I could never escape my colleagues and where I had to take orders from strangers and follow their timetable, even when it was clearly detrimental to my own health and wellbeing to comply.  In the long run, it was better than not taking the trip at all, and I've learned some useful lessons.  Still, I feel compelled to try to come back, to do it my own way, to feed my own mind and soul without worrying about structure or checking off a set of boxes or the things other people say I ought to want out of the journey.  It's far better to travel the way I live, and slow down to find my own brand of enrichment and fulfillment rather than just struggling to keep up. 

Sloth and gluttony

The past 24 hours have primarily been spent on very boring attempts at self care.  I napped yesterday, got up and took a walk and shopped for a few provisions, then had a late dinner and went to bed shortly thereafter.  💤

This morning, for the first time in over three weeks, I slept until I woke up naturally without an alarm or a phone call, and then remembered I had one more breakfast included with my little package today.  Given that I finally could enjoy it alone and at leisure, it seemed worth getting out of bed.  So, I found our buffet, and I ate. And ate. And ate some more.  It's been at least 20 years since this much food has gone into my body at once.  It's normally physically impossible.  Even when we had the extended multiple course meals back in Italy, I only had a minimal serving of each food and didn't finish anything.  This morning, I had 3 plates of food—eggs, beans, fruit, cold turkey, cheese, pastries—as well as a heaping bowl of cereal.  After spending about 20 minutes sipping hot chocolate and reading the news, I couldn't resist returning one more time to fetch a peanut butter sandwich.   All this, and I'm not even full.   If I weren't just bored with eating and really craved something else(and if I didn't dread the humiliation of being banned from the buffet), I could easily take in more without any discomfort.  Perhaps the food really was necessary to my body for some reason, but I'm still hoping, for the sake of my health and my clothing budget, that this gaping hunger doesn't become a trend. 

If you can read this...

I'm sure that any city in Europe could begin to feel like home if I had a month or two to stay put and soak it all in, but, obviously, that hasn't been an option on my current trip.  Departing Paris after only a day and half left me unsatisfied, like a cliffhanger with no clear plans for a sequel.  I must confess, though, that stepping off the Eurostar in England provided an amazing relief for stress of which I wasn't even fully aware.  Seeing everything written in the language that comes naturally to my brain makes the world seem so simple.

Though I'm shy about speech, I can read enough French, Italian and Spanish to get around fairly well; but it didn't occur to me until now how much conscious effort I was spending on translation every day.    Is it possible that I could practice and study enough to feel this comfortable with other languages?  Thinking back to my early days in school, I feel really ripped off.  When I was a little child, and could have learned all this easily, I lived in a place where speaking only English was a matter of pride, where foreign language instruction was never an option prior to high school, and where those courses were a joke even when they became available.   Almost everything I know about any language other than American English is self-taught.  Children in many parts of the US are being cheated out of the opportunity to fully participate in the world by the way we approach education.  Of course, adults can acquire  new tongues, at least to some extent, but it's much more difficult when we have no foundation and no way to practice verbally.     I can't help worrying that "making America great again" is going to involve policies that only exacerbate this problem.

At any rate, it's time for me to quit my bitching and get some rest.  More from London when I've settled in bit. 

laissez le bon temps rouler

We had some guided sightseeing this morning, including the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, among other obligatory tourist stops. Many from the group will be visiting Versailles this afternoon, but I've opted out, suspecting that it will cross my threshold for gaud and excess and just piss me off. Besides, I've really wanted to visit the Louvre more than anything else in the city, and that's where I'm going, now that I've finished my lunch.  Here's hoping the line isn't prohibitive by the time I get there.

--------------

The queue was long, but it moved swiftly enough, and I got inside in time to wait in line to buy a ticket and then stand in yet another line to use the lavatory before spending an hour inside the museum itself.   During this whole first standing-in-lines phase, there were emergency alarms going off, which were completely ignored by everyone.  Fortunately,  there did not seem to be an actual problem.

I was overwhelmed by the size of the museum and the volume of work in the permanent collection.  It was immediately apparent that I would never see it all without planning a visit of many days especially for that purpose.  So, I followed the signs to the Mona Lisa, which is apparently exactly what everyone else had come there to do.  An immense gallery of Italian paintings was sparsely populated(relatively speaking), except for a small branch, where a packed corral of eager onlookers pushed and shoved to take selfies with the famous lady.  Many raised their phones as high as they could reach, recording segments of video as through they expected her to move.   Her mysterious smile, with its hint of a smirk, never seemed more appropriate.  You'd imagine that either she or da Vinci knew exactly what would be happening in 2017.

I'd like to see it all someday, but between the vastness of the Louvre, my time limitations, and the nerve wracking density of the crowd, I was convinced that someday was not today, and I left to get ice cream like a proper tourist.  On the way, I detoured through the Tuileries garden, amused by a flock of crows who seemed to be at war with the local pigeons.  Who knows what drama unfolds in the bird world, unnoticed by human eyes?

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Our farewell dinner was a warm gathering, with boeuf bourguignon, frog legs, assorted aged cheeses, and too much red wine.  We were entertained by a guitarist and singer who must have been an actual clown at some point in his career, and he managed to keep me laughing for most of the evening.  The sole exception was the five minute period when he noticed me singing along with La Vie En Rose and compelled me to get up and sing it with him in front of everyone.  This would have been fine except that I only know 80% of the lyrics and my pronunciation is atrocious.  At least it added to the comedy for everyone else, I suppose.

We ended the evening on the Trocadero platform watching the lights on the Eiffel Tower.  While I am of a mind with Guy de Maupassant, who often ate in the restaurant at the Eiffel Tower's base so that he might avoid having to look at it, it is fun to watch other people and their reactions as they view the tower and the light show.   The excitement it evokes is inexplicable and almost magical, and people from every corner of the globe fall under its spell.  Sometimes being in a crowd is beautiful, if I can just carve out enough room to breathe and stand very still. 

Arise

Yesterday left me with little to report.  Mostly, it was a day on the road, trying to sleep and recuperate.  My upper respiratory malady kept on giving, and on reaching our hotel in Bilbao, I looked in the mirror and discovered that I had developed conjunctivitis.  It started out looking monstrous, but, luckily, had improved enough by yesterday morning that I could be fairly certain I wouldn't need emergency intervention.  We stopped in Bordeaux, but I was not yet keen on exploring much and spent most of my two hours there sipping warm mint tea in a cafe where everything was red.   Poitiers provided a hearty dinner and a cozy bed.   

Today, my eyes are roughly the same size again, and I'm determined to finish strong in Paris, where we'll arrive this afternoon.  The stop in Amboise this morning was promising, with bright sun, crisp air, and friendly people(who are refreshing to find, wherever I may be).   Let's hope the trend continues.  🤞