Graced

Yesterday was one of those days I just felt defeated.  I rushed around - er, virtually speaking - trying to do all my band work for the month within a couple of hours.  Y'know, shooting off emails about booking and line-ups and collaborations and promo.  Generating and discussing ideas for CD artwork and release show festivities.  Tweeting and posting events and getting very tripped up by Facebook... twice!  Around mid-afternoon, I waved the white flag at the daunting fleet of social networking sites, technology in general and, really, The Rules Of The World at large.  Then, stuck in my slump, I stayed several hours late at the office to try to make up for the lost time...but ultimately ended up watching some nerdy TV online.

When I finally dragged myself out of the building, it was nearly sunset.  While I'd been sitting behind a glaring screen in a windowless beige office all day, it had been raining outside in the world.  But now all was still.  Droplets jeweled the yellow lilies just outside the door and I slowed to admire them, internally grumbling, "Pretty... but they're just city flowers." Landscaped, you know...put there by the Institute to offset the rampant squareness of the architecture.  As I set out on my walk, though, the cement was painted with patches of sky all around and I began to really see the silence everywhere.  The puddles were unrippled, the trees were unfluttered as if every leaf were reverently saving every drop of rain offered it.  And against the luminous gray clouds shifting overhead, it was all so, so green.

So I walked and I looked and I wrapped my sweater a bit tighter around me and I suddenly felt an overwhelming rush of gratitude.  True gratitude, and it struck me how it felt different from when I consciously remind myself to list all the things I ought to be grateful for.  I just - was.  I just was graced.  By the world around me.  By the people I love.  By the incredible fortune of being able to make music that might, once in awhile, make people feel something true.  By the sweep of my imagination.  Even by the stability of my day job that allows me many luxuries, including the dream of a more fulfilling career.

And my mind then returned to rooting through the trove of ideas for novels and stories and poems and lyrics that I keep squirreling away for When I Have Time.  And that led me back to the dreaded technology I've come to depend on, specifically the laptop I have been fretting over buying for months now.  Since I have only had my work computer in the office and a VERY old and temperamental laptop (also from work), my computer time has effectively been limited to sitting at work in the aforementioned windowless beige office.  But no more!  I am breaking free the shackles and investing in my writing life!  I JUST today clicked on "Place Order" for a Macbook Pro!!!  I'll be able to write in coffee shops again!   I'll be able to write in the middle of the night!  Hell, maybe I'll even go back to the old days of drunken blogging!  Ha!  Cheers!  And in the meantime, I'm going to take a cue from the trees and carefully absorb this grace.  I  just am incredibly fortunate.

P.S. And here's wishing you a VERY HAPPY PRIDE!  Pride, which was actually invented so that lesbians could run into their exes.  But don't worry, I'll most likely be doing laundry, going to some awesome shows, and re-working my schedule to make time for all those worlds of words I am going to start writing.  By God.  But I hope you all go out bedecked in sparkling rainbows, marching and cheering and swilling and swooning with the best of 'em.  Oh, and don't miss MEandJOANCOLLINS & Mrs Danvers after the parade on Saturday!

In which the singer comes out

Hi I'm queer!

Well, most people would use the word "bisexual" to describe me, which is okay because it's accurate to say that I am attracted to women and men, and have had long-term romantic relationships with (people who identify as) both men and women. I just find that word "bisexual" so...either/or. Like... it doesn't really step outside of the idea that, okay, either you're This or you're That. Wait, you're not? Okay, then you're ThisandThat. A bicycle has two wheels. A biped uses two feet. I don't really walk around with a dude and a lady on each arm, you know? 

I don't know, maybe it's just not that sweet, "bi." 

And love, of course, is very sweet. The people I have loved have lots of things in common...passion for music, intelligence, a certain willingness to question the status quo, a love of animals, some capacity for silliness, an awareness of beauty, creativity, and a depth that is hard to articulate but immediately recognizable when you get to it. These things, along with open eyes and an intriguing combination of vulnerability and power -- oh and they have to give solid hugs -- seem to be the real themes of my attractions. Nothing about it feels either/or to me. *Shrug*

Anyways, so I like the word queer for myself because it encompasses variety and fluidity. It's inclusive. I like inclusiveness. Anyone picking up on a theme there?  I know there's a whole lot of political and sociocultural baggage that goes along with all of this, but really?  This is just a part of who I am just like how I don't have one favorite color or food because there is so much to love in orange and blue and purple, mac & cheese and raw oysters and kalamata olives.  I love what's worth loving and I'm lucky that my "chemistry" agrees with me.

So while I feel passionate about creating an inclusive world, I probably won't be stepping up on very many soapboxes here.  I hope that if I break any barriers, it will be through simple honesty about who I am, which is a perfectly flawed, beautiful mess of a human being.  

(That's right:  just like everyone in the world.)