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

2 comments:

cripchick said...

mhmmm i see it as hardship too---especially these last few weeks of having to fire one, switch agencies, then not having a PA thus being "stuck", etc etc etc... but the other day, my PA was helping me get dressed and i was playing what we were doing in my head. that's when i noticed how poetic it was (and how much i could make it sound like a sex poem.) grin.

thanks for the love!

The Girl said...

Dear God. You posted and my readers doubled. There is someone from Nova Scotia reading now... How odd!

Also "Praise him all creatures here below. Praise him above ye heavenly host. Praise father son and holy ghost."

From memory. I thank you!