my inner child

a little place reserved for...

I spent a mere 5 years of my life in Pittsburgh, but the fondness that I have for the city would make one think I spent a lifetime there. While in Pittsburgh I completed my undergraduate degree at Duquesne University. My major was Sociology with a concentration in Social and Political Policy, most people who know me aren't at all surprised by this. Truth be told - I transfered to Duquesne for their Athletic Training program. After finishing up my undergrad and not having any real idea with what I wanted to do I decided to enroll in Duquesne's graduate program. I completed what is called a Masters Certificate in Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies before deciding that I needed a little more practical application in my studies, so after finishing the certificate I "dropped out".

I spent the next year working as a Theraputic Support Staff for a social service agency, Community Alternatives. And one of my favorite jobs, working as a Starbuck's Shift Manager/Barista. (Look for future posts on these two job experiences...)

I lived on Mt. Washington for awhile, on Lelia Street. (I lived on the second floor of the red brick building - it came complete with a front and back porch. The front porch was great for hangin out because you were so high up not many people thought to look up. And in true Pittsburgh form we had a recliner out there, so it was perfect for reading and just plain ol' relaxing. The back porch was great becasue it was surrounded by tree branches, so one naturally felt as though you were in a tree house - at least that is what I pretended. And I also did some time up in Allentown, living on Knox Ave. (if you look at the street view on the map, my house was the white one with the green and white awnings over the windows). I miss my backyard in both of these spaces.

People have often asked if I'd move back to Pittsburgh and while I consider it, it seems so far from a reality. There are plenty of times I miss Pittsburgh more than I thought possible...times when I am riding my bike home from work or walking aimlessly through Brooklyn. Sometimes it forces me to swallow the lump in my throat and keep on keepin on. I often think about what it is that I love so much about the city...is it the water, never too far from a feeling of cleansing; was it the character of the City of Steel: dirty, gritty, grey, cold, a preception of struggle for its continued breath, the hills, the greenery, the well defined neighborhoods? Was it the connections I forged there, the people, my friends, the strangers?

People often ask me where I am from, I never answer the question - there is no answer. Here's a break down: Born = Warrington England followed by a move to Eich Germany, a shift to the states where I spent a brief couple of months in upstate NY, followed by a move to Howell, NJ (I was there from age 4.5 until the summer before 6th grade), then it was down to Northern VA (6th grade through high school), 1 year of college in VA and then a transfer to Pittsburgh...5 years in the 'burgh followed by a year of transition in North Jersey and then a move to big NYC, I've been here for 3 years. People tell me that since my formative years were spent in VA that should be my answer, however I feel as close to "from Virgina" as I do saying I'm from Japan. Don't get me wrong, I have fond memories of VA but I'm not from there. I will continue to answer the question with a sly, "I ain't got roots."

Whatta Guy

Nalgene thoughts.

So I don't know how many of you out there have Nalgene waterbottles, or something similar but I know I have a handful. Like many people I bought it as a means of cutting down on how many plastic waterbottles I was adding to landfills...but now I've got all these waterbottles and too much research on how they are harmful.

Are you curious to know what to do with your Nalgene bottle now that you know it contains BPA ? Well, I have been looking around for either places to recycle my Nalgenes or other ideas of what I can do with them...Here are a few ideas I've thought were worthwhile...

SolLight awesome because not only are you keeping the Nalgene out of the landfill but you are keeping a bunch of batteries out by using this solarpowered light to turn your Nalgene into a lantern. Plus the added benefit is you now have a hollow, waterproof container to store maps, fire supplies, first aid materials, granola and other snacks...

depending on what size you have you could use it as a:
-penny jar
-to hold pens, pencils, paintbrushes, markers, etc.
-jar to keep your old batteries in until you can recycle them (NYC drop-offs)
-give it to a child in your life filled with crayons and some pages of a coloringbook, or one side used paper, hell, make your own paper and put it in there...
-make noise makers for rallies, marches, parades, protests, etc.
-fill it up only part way and freeze it and use it to keep your lunch cold

I haven't been able to find a place that recylces Nalgenes and other 7 plastics - so for now the alternate uses will have to do...

In NYC here is what you can recycle .

So if you make the decision not you use your Nalgene as a waterbottle, some other options are KleanKanteen , Sigg , or use an old glass container (yes, its breakable.)

WORK TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING .

is it just me...

Last night I attended a public forum, Cities Respond to Climate Change: The Challenge of Energy Efficiency at The New School , which happens to be my alma mater. All in all, I thought the event was great and really provided some very relevant and timely information about cities and their responses to climate change currently and overtime (Portland, Oregan has definately taken a historical lead in this sense).

The reason I wanted to write about it was because I was so bothered by one of the panelists and the approaches he was advocating for. Max Schulz is a senior fellow at The Manhattan Institute , Center for Energy Policy and the Environment . According to his bio he served as senior policy advisor and director of speechwriting for United States secretaries of energy Samuel Bodman and Spencer Abraham , both Bush appointees.

Schulz was advocating for an increase in the nuclear share of energy (such a bad road to go down...not to mention scarey) - he also was attempting to advance the idea that energy efficency has only lead to an increase in energy consumption (I'm pretty sure that EnergyStar rated products in homes DOES NOT lead to people using them MORE - think about it, you buy a new fridge, its rated well - do you now use it more? No, it's plugged in the same as the old one - the difference, it is simply consuming less energy...) WAKE UP PEOPLE!

Now the thing that I have always enjoyed about The New School is that they will structure their panels in such a way that there is always someone whose policy agenda is different from the progressive ideals that The New School was founded upon and carries forward today. Last year I attended a forum where Newt Gingrich was the keynote speaker. Many students were angry that he was invited to address the school, as was I, but I wasn't upset that he was invited, I was upset at the way the forum was structured. At this particular forum there was no Q and A period; this is what bother me most. I appreciate hearing from folks who hold different ideas and opinions than me, but give me a chance to question them, give them a change to defend their agendas, give them a chance to skew science and data to support their outlandish proposals, give them a chance to hear the frustrations of the "leaders of tomorrow", give them a chance to hear that people think they are wrong and of course give them the chance to stumble over their words as they try to defend themselves.

On a similar note - I once decided to read Ann Coulter's book How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) . My mother bought the book for my brother (this is a whole other entry in and of itself)...anyway, he wasn't reading it and I decided that I should read up on what misinformation Ann Coulter is spewing. I got about halfway through the book and I couldn't read anymore - I really am convinced that she is crazy, and for that matter anyone who could believe the ideas she is defending is as well.

It all just makes me wonder, am I living in a different world than these people? Is it just me or are they CRAZY?

Do your part...

http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080506/MULTIMEDIA02/80505016/-1/PHOTOS07

forget paper vs. plastic... CHOOSE CLOTH!

All We Need Is Love...

here is the March 26, 2008 Advocate story.

My thoughts = I think this is amazing in the most positive way. Unfortunately, the response to this story has been overwhelmingly negative with people saying that "these people are mentally ill" and replying to online message boards with other words of hate and judgement. To date, Gender Identity Disorder has not been classified as a mental illness within the scientific community.

Instead of reacting with judgement and hate to thing that are unknown to us or different from us I truely wish that people would respond with compassion and an open mind. Here again I lean towards the idealist however, I am so bothered by the growing examples of hatred and hypocrisy. If more people were driven by love and this type of determination I wonder what kind of world we would live in. I applaud the Beaties.

Below is a NYTimes story from yesterday.

June 22, 2008
He’s Pregnant. You’re Speechless.
By GUY TREBAY
WHEN Thomas Beatie gives birth in the next few weeks to a baby girl, the blessed event will mark both a personal milestone and a strange and wondrous crossroads in the evolution of American pop culture.

Mr. Beatie — as anyone who has turned on a television, linked to a blog or picked up a tabloid in the last few months is aware — is a married 34-year-old man, born a woman, who managed to impregnate himself last year using frozen sperm and who went public this spring as the nation’s first “pregnant father.”

That this story attracted attention around the world was hardly surprising. Who, after all, could resist the image of a shirtless Madonna, with a ripe belly on a body lacking breasts and with a square jaw unmistakably fringed by a beard? For a time, clips of Mr. Beatie’s appearance on “Oprah,” where he was filmed undergoing ultrasound, as well as shirtless images of him from an autobiographical feature in the Advocate magazine, were everywhere, and they were impossible to look away from.

Partly a carnival sideshow and partly a glimpse at shifting sexual tectonics, his image and story powered past traditional definitions of gender and exposed a realm that seemed more than passing strange to some observers — and altogether natural to those who inhabit it.

“This is just a neat human-interest story about a particular couple using the reproductive capabilities they have,” said Mara Kiesling, director of the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington. “There’s really nothing remarkable” about the Beatie pregnancy, she said.

Yet as the first pregnant transman to go public, Mr. Beatie has exposed a mass audience to alterations in the outlines of gender that may be outpacing our comprehension. In the discussions that followed his announcement, what became poignantly clear is that there is no good language yet to discuss his situation, words like an all-purpose pronoun to describe an idea as complex as a pregnant man.

“When there’s a lot of fascination around a figure like Thomas Beatie,” said Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California, “it points to other changes already happening elsewhere in the culture.”

Among the changes Ms. Halberstam noted are medical innovations that have expanded the possibilities for body modification. There are also studies that indicate, as Ms. Halberstam noted, that women respond sexually to the individual, before differentiating by sex. And the broadening legal scope of marriage has also had its effects on people like Mr. Beatie, who says of himself, “I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy,” but who might have trouble holding on to some of those assertions if he did something as simple as moving from Oregon.

Americans, Ms. Halberstam said, have long been fascinated by narratives of sexual transformation, at least since the era of Christine Jorgensen, an early male-to-female transsexual (born George Jorgensen Jr. in the Bronx) whose sex change, performed by doctors in Sweden, prompted The Daily News to run a front page story under the headline “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty” and made Miss Jorgensen as tabloid-notorious then as Mr. Beatie is, the man who “went abroad and came back a broad.”

The Jorgensen case in 1951 was treated as groundbreaking, just as Mr. Beatie’s was on “Oprah,” despite the well-established fact that physicians at the German Institute of Sexual Science had performed successful sexual reassignment surgeries decades before. If Miss Jorgensen’s story prefigured Mr. Beatie’s, it also pointed toward a future in which gender continues to change in response to changing laws and mores and, as important, new technology.

“The Beatie case seems like a way of having some of the Trans 101 discussions publicly, giving them one kind of a face and doing it in a way that’s not asking anybody for anything,” said Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a professor at the City University of New York graduate school of English who has written extensively on gender. “He’s pregnant, he seems happy. It’s not in happening in any kind of a judicial, let alone criminal, context so it’s not a matter of claiming a right. It’s a matter of exercising one.”

By bringing his story to the public and disclosing the particulars of his anatomical journey, Ms. Sedgwick added, Mr. Beatie is “making visible the fact that a lot of people’s experience of making these decisions isn’t about getting a penis or losing a penis.” For many transgender people, she said, “genital surgery is not what defines gender, and that will be news for lots and lots of Americans,” who may have trouble comprehending the idea that for some, anatomy does not define woman or man.

Mr. Beatie does not have a penis; his clitoris was surgically reconfigured to mimic a phallus. And the person born in Hawaii in 1974 as Tracy Lagondino also altered his body with chest reconstruction surgery, took bimonthly testosterone injections for years to suppress feminine sex characteristics, grew a beard and saw his hairline change. Like many transmen, he chose not to remove his female reproductive organs. And so, when it was clear that his wife could not have another child (she has two grown daughters from a previous relationship), Mr. Beatie stopped hormone therapy until he could conceive.

“Not a lot of transmen get what’s called ‘bottom’ or ‘lower’ surgery,” Ms. Halberstam explained, referring to procedures like the one Mr. Beatie had, and to yet more radical interventions like hysterectomy. “If they want a penis, they don’t want a micro-penis,” she said. If what they want is to be men, she added, they see no reason why that goal is compromised by keeping their ovaries.

Issues like these have made Mr. Beatie’s story so compelling; the sense that trans identity in the Webster sense of the prefix signifies some threshold state of being — “across” or “beyond” or “through.”

Ms. Sedgwick said that if you look at postings on Web sites like Oprah Winfrey’s and The Huffington Post, “It seems as though there are lots and lots of comments saying: ‘That’s not a man having a baby. That’s a woman having a baby.’ ”

Partly that reaction results from what Ms. Sedgwick calls a phobic response to changes in identities that for most people seem God-given and settled at birth. Partly it is a matter “of people having to go through the stages of figuring things out,” she said.

As Ms. Kiesling, of the National Center for Transgender Equality, noted: “The long-term benefit of this story is not ‘Pregnant Man Trims Hedge,’ ” referring to a widely circulated photo of a bearded and pregnant Mr. Beatie wielding a power tool. “The Beatie story raises questions we’re all looking at now, in a lot of contexts,” about the welter of new possibilities produced by a landscape in which legalized same-sex partnerships reshape traditional ideas about husband and wife and mom and dad.

Contacted at home in Bend, Ore., Mr. Beatie declined to comment for this article. He was resting, he said, and would reserve further comment until after the baby is born. A book that he was contracted to write has been shelved, according to his publishers, St. Martin’s Press. And so once the “pregnant father” delivers, he can return to being the person his neighbors refer to as “a quiet, regular guy.”

By then his story may have served its purpose, Ms. Sedgwick said. It will have showed us that: “People experience gender very differently and some have really individual and imaginative uses to make of it. That’s an important thing for people to wrap their minds around.”