Sunday, October 18, 2009

What I've Been Reading

My blogroll is never very long, because I have mild* OCD and can't bear clutter, even on the right hand side of a blog post. But in lieu of actually doing things with my life worth writing about (hence current acute posting shortage), I've been doing a fair bit of reading during dissertation downtime. Which, when you have fatigue issues and are supposed to be working on something intense, is a lot of the time.

I can't believe it's taken me this long to find FWD/Forward at http://disabledfeminists.com/ . It's a team blog on the subject of disability and feminism. There should be more blogging about the spaces where disability, sexuality, gender and life converge. This is a fantastic example of such.

Cripchick's blog is a poetic, activist take on life and disability. I'm still wrapping my imagination around the poem she put up yesterday. Beautiful and world-expanding. The theme of this year's Greenbelt festival was 'Standing in the Long Now' and experiencing moments in time as moments in eternity - but I too often waste energy fighting to get past the many moments of frustration in life, rather than appreciating them with the depth that Cripchick does in this poem. I want to see the frustrations of the 'carer'/disabled person relationship as more than something to endure as quickly as possible.

My Girl is blogging her journey through her father's experience of cancer at http://twentysevenpercent.blogspot.com/ . She wrote about planning and living life yesterday, in a way that made me think differently about how well we cope with disability, as a disabled family (that's how I think of us, along with multi-cultural family, and mixed-religion family, and really will be married soon, if we can just get a bloody move on with the planning family). It's interesting when you get the chance to see these things from up on someone else's viewing point - if only in passing. I spend so much of my life thinking I'm a failure at, well, everything. It's sometimes useful to remember that I have a lot to deal with, and that I usually deal with it quite well. Not the most social model or activist-y viewpoint. That doesn't matter. To everything there is a season...**

Other stuff:
- ASBO Jesus makes me happy
- Two Lumps is one of the funniest online comics out there
- Shapely Prose is amazing and inspiring writing, whatever size you happen to be: check out Schrödinger’s Rapist
- Thinking Christians of any denomination will adore the Sarcastic Lutheran

Anyone know any good sociology/social theory blogs? I'm in the market for some reading around such things.


And with that, I must fly. I mooted the idea of a lay choir at church, and suddenly I'm one of the founding members of something that might turn out to take up rather a lot of time. How I get myself into these things, I do not know. (Well, I do. I say things, while in sub-hypomanic I can do everything mode, like "I'd like to set up a lay choir" and people actually take me seriously. Crazy.)

Wanders off singing 'Praise God from whom all blessings flow'...

*Ha. Ha, ha ha ha, ha.
**Ecclesiastes 3:1