Being Amber Rhea

Closed for business

In some ways I never thought this day would come, but I’ve been feeling the need for a while now: I’m closing this blog. Not necessarily forever – because I don’t want to be one of those bloggers that makes some grand exit statement and flounces off, only to reappear back at the same URL a few months later – but for the near future, at least. Who knows, I might end up back here at some point, writing about any number of things. Or this might become another internet artifact.

I don’t have a grand exit statement, other than this blog has run its course and is no longer good for me. I’ve written here for over seven years, and now it’s time to pack up and start over. You might say that’s just a psychological thing, and yes, I’m sure it is; but I need the feeling of a fresh start.

I’m tired of feeling the breath on my neck from readers ready to latch onto any word and twist it based on their own bizarre motivations. I’m exhausted from trying to explain myself and anticipate attacks. The imperative to self-censor has become too great a feeling, and as much as I’ve tried to soldier on, I’ve realized I can’t, and it would be foolish to continue trying.

I’m not going to be ultra secretive about my new location, and if you try hard enough (it’s not even all that hard), you’ll be able to find it. I’m not keeping it a secret, I’m just not publicizing it. If you do find and choose to lurk in my new space, there can be no misunderstanding as to its purpose. It is mine to do with as I choose, and its use is at my sole discretion.

In its time, this blog has been good to me and led me to some really great things. With any luck, the new blog will do the same.

See y’all later.

Farewell to the Apple IIe and Mac Plus

Here’s what will probably be the last of my “Thanks for the memories” videos. Sorry for the camera shaking at the beginning; hopefully it’s not bad enough to make anyone seasick.

I talk about the Apple IIe and the Mac Plus. (I also have an Apple IIgs Woz Limited Edition but I couldn’t think of anything to say about it!)

Once again…

…tonight, I’m having that thought, of what would happen if I really truly stopped apologizing for who I am, for taking up space, for having feelings, for having quirks, for being me? If I stopped cloaking my vulnerability in sarcastic self-deprecating asides about “navel-gazing” and being “emo?”

What would that be like?

Every few months/years/whatever I have this moment of, good lord, that would be REALLY different, maybe I should try it! And I’ve been steadily moving toward it for years, but let me tell you, it’s REALLY fucking hard. This isn’t just psychobabble, people.

What would happen if I really did enact that personal revolution?

One quick thing

No time to write the long response post right now because I’m about to head out to a potluck lunch for SPARK. But I do want to say, some of the comments kind of irritate me because it sounds like people think I have trouble talking about the fact that I have dealt with depression for years and take medication for it. That, I have no qualms whatsoever about mentioning, and in fact sometimes I can be rather aggressive about inserting it into conversations when I perceive the discussion is veering toward “judgmental, ignorant, and assholish regarding mental illness.”

It’s probably not fair of me to be irritated but I just wanted to draw the distinction. I’m not writing about coming to terms with “admitting” that I have depression or how awful it is to “admit” that I take meds. Fuck that. This is something I deal with, the meds are necessary and I would not be alive without them, people can either believe me or blow it out their ass. The stuff I’ve written about so far and intend to write more about, either here or in another space, is more of a higher level thing of confronting my own internalized prejudices/stigma about the concept of disability, and how society in general perceives disability, including a lot of the language around it (e.g., the idea that a person w/ a disability is “damaged” – you would not believe the back and forth I was having w/ myself in the shower this morning over that concept!)

And:

Thank you to everyone who left comments on my depression/mental health post from last night. I’ve read all the comments and have been thinking about them and formulating a response (likely in the form of another post), but it’s not fully baked yet. Just wanted to let you know I haven’t been ignoring your comments. Keep ‘em coming!

ETA: I find myself flustered/annoyed at certain words now that I am more familiar w/ the disability rights movement. I guess I am realizing (not that I didn’t realize it before, but seeing in a different way, maybe I should say) just how deeply ingrained the stigmas and preconceptions about disability are. But I’ll save that for the fabled post to come.

Fragments: Sex

When I was in high school, I heard all the stories about teenagers having sex. Oh, the horror! But I wondered, how are so many people getting away with all this sex?? Apparently a lot of them are doing it right in their own bedrooms! My parents didn’t work typical 9-5 jobs, so at least one of them was often around, and even if they weren’t, their schedules were so irregular that they could pop in at any moment. Sex in the house would be a foolish risk, and I had absolutely no clue what would happen if I was caught – but I was terrified to risk finding out. So in high school, for me, sex was in cars. (This was senior year of high school.) I became adept at searching the roads of Augusta for concealed areas. I always had at least three potential places up my sleeve. One time, parked at the top of a cul-de-sac where nothing was built yet, I am 99% sure it was a cop car that drove up and turned around. Surely they saw the car parked there, in the middle of the night. And they didn’t check it out? I still don’t understand. But I know I was lucky that night. As soon as I saw those headlights, I hopped down to the area under the dashboard on the passenger’s side, trying to cover myself with my retro 1970s green polyester shirt. The thought racing through my head was, “I’ll never go to college, I’ll never go to college, I’ll never go to college.” But they turned around and left.

Senior year of high school was a tumultuous time – a mix of highs and lows from one end of the spectrum to the other – but there was nothing tumultuous about sex, not in a bad way, I mean. Everything about it felt right and I felt like I was being true to myself, freed somehow, even for just a little while.

I debated the politics of blowjobs with a friend. Ridiculously, it’s basically the same debate that occurs ever few months in the feminist blogosphere. He said he wouldn’t let a girl give him a blowjob, because that was degrading to her. I said, excuse me? Let? What is this “let” business? In that scenario, the woman is just as passive as if she’s “getting fucked” or similar language we use wherein the woman is the recipient of whatever the man does to her. I said, what if I want to do it? Are you saying I’m not able to make that decision? Because I find that pretty insulting. If I want to do it, how is it degrading?

I don’t remember his answer, I think he just muttered something. Years later he apparently still had odd ideas about sex, but that’s another story altogether.

We went to senior prom together and I heard later from a mutual friend that he said he “wonder[ed] if Amber is going to try anything.” Try anything! Ha! No, I did not “try anything” – because, I did not subscribe to the idea of sex as a game, where you have to pull one over on the other person, con them into having sex with you. I don’t know if ‘consent’ was part of my vocabulary at the time but I smelled bullshit when I saw the way sex was portrayed in media, pop culture, society, everywhere, and it didn’t jibe with common sense, to me.

The people at my private school were way more progressive about sex than the people at my public school. A few of us had this silly goal to get everyone laid before graduation. We knew it wouldn’t happen but it was a fun thing to talk about, at the time. It seems stupid looking back, but hey, we were 18.

This picture was taken in France, which is apropos to nothing, but it seems like a good choice for inclusion in this post:

Fragments: Fear

Last night I was thinking about the fact that fear has been a theme throughout my life. It kept me in a state of inertia during my teen years when I was still living at home; I was being harmed but trying to take any sort of action was too risky because if the outcome wasn’t perfectly in my favor then I would be in trouble; I’d be harmed further. The same thing was repeated in my marriage (though ultimately I broke the pattern, in that case; yay for personal growth!). It’s also what stopped me from ever taking the step over the line and actually going into sex work. There are other examples. Is it what stops me from calling my health issues what they are?

Tonight, on the way home from Manuel’s, I was thinking again about all the considerations about whether depression should be called a disability. (I even have a hard time calling it a mental illness – hey, I grew up in the same society as everyone else, and we’ve all internalized the stigma to an extent.) I was having the usual back and forth in my head. I wondered what other people think of people who have mental health issues and identify as disabled. I wondered what my closest friends really think about my struggle with depression and my questions about whether or not it is a disability. I wondered how much it really matters what it’s called and why I’m so preoccupied with that question lately. I wondered if Rusty feels burdened or irritated or manipulated or limited or frustrated or exasperated or thinks I blow shit out of proportion or thinks I make shit up or thinks I do things just to get attention or rolls his eyes at all my ponderings on identity. But maybe that’s just because I roll my eyes at myself, a little (or a lot) and maybe I should stop that. I wondered how much of this comes from internalizing of the societal stigmas and how much is me being a responsible person who thinks of others instead of being too self-absorbed.

I wondered what it would be like if I could wipe the slate clean and not have all that baggage and all those wonderings.

Do other people think about this stuff, in the way I do? I often think about how we can never really know if the way we experience the world is “the norm” or if it’s an exception. We can never really know what it feels like to be someone else. But because I’m fascinated with people and interactions, and because it comes perhaps too easily to me to think of how I would feel/act if I were in a certain situation that someone else is in, I always wonder.

We hear a lot of messages in the media and pop culture about being an over-medicated society; people talk about kids getting ADHD diagnoses and roll their eyes because that’s just a scapegoat, that’s not a real condition; we get angry at people who can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps and shake things off. I admit I feel that way sometimes, when I hear about someone filing for disability, and then their disability turns out to be… PTSD. Anxiety. Depression. ADD. Etc. C’mon if I can force myself through the day certainly other people can too! Plus Americans love to focus on individualism (which, let me be clear, I do not think is a bad thing at all) – why should I subsidize someone else just because they have depression, right? Not on the tax payer’s dime, etc.; all the Libertarian/Republican talking points. And even as I push back and say, that’s spoken as someone who has never dealt with mental illness, sometimes those thoughts go through my head too.

LiveJournal, maybe?

Once again, and more and more, I am considering starting a friends-locked LiveJournal. Yes, LiveJournal! Why not continue to do password-protected blog posts on here, you might ask? Well, I have to send out the password each time and that feels dramatic. People who don’t have the password can see that the post is there and that has led to stupid drama in the past. And somehow I feel like it would be comforting to steal away somewhere that’s on a completely different system, totally third-party managed, not a domain I own and a platform I manage myself. Might not make much sense but for some reason it appeals to me in a way that doing password-protected posts here doesn’t, at the moment.

I won’t abandon this blog (and hell, I might not even start that LJ at all, I might just talk about it forever and never do it) and I actually hate blog posts where the blogger talks about how they don’t feel comfortable posting anymore because of what people might think. But that’s my situation and it’s not as simple as “what people might think” in the reductive sense of, OMG I base my entire self-worth on the approval and validation of strangers. No, it’s just, like Mary J. Blige, I too do not want drama in my life. And I’m sick of feeling eyes on me, of people who have their own expectations of what I should write or should do. Or people who have just decided I’m The Enemy and no matter what I say, they’re going to pounce on it and tell me how wrong I am. Or my mom will read my posts and call me up and say she doesn’t want me to get mad but am I okay, really, am I, can I please take care of HER needs by NOT working shit out in a way that’s helpful for me? For some people, I’m not enough of an activist w/ my blogging – it’s too personal, everyone hates navel-gazing, I mean no one CARES, get over yourself, geez. For others I am not personal enough, they want to know more, they feel entitled to every detail. And for still others I’m just doin’ it wrong, no matter what.

Some things I’ve had on my mind and wanted to write about are:

• My experiences w/ depression – past, present, possibly future. Musings of all manner along those lines. In particular I keep thinking about something mentioned on BADD – like Melissa at Shakesville, I wonder, should I call myself a person w/ a disability? Whenever I try that on for size, it feels wrong, like I’m appropriating, or trying to give myself a label to get attention, or making a mountain out of a mole hill, I mean I’m not REALLY disabled, and wouldn’t the REAL disabled people get pissed off if every person who just has DEPRESSION starts calling themselves “disabled?” -But that’s the problem, right, the “just” – JUST depression.

  Is the whole identity thing getting out of hand, anyway? Sometimes I see people with so many comma-delimited self-descriptors that it makes me roll my eyes. But I think it’s important for people to self-identify and name who and what they are. But I’ve also seen people abuse it, as a way to manipulate. They had ISSUES but they cloaked it in identity. I don’t want to look like one of those people. And the eye-rolling, too, well maybe that’s just knee-jerk from growing up in a culture saturated w/ Fox News type media, where “political correctness” is a big joke… look at those silly people making up terminology! Woman of color? Person of size? Sex worker? Haw haw haw, come on now, we’re the WASPy upper-middle-class straight dudes and we set the terms, not you, silly Others!

  And on and on along those lines.

• How sick I am of people misusing the word privilege. Hint: If you put the word “unearned” in front of it, you are talking about something totally different.
• More about my history of wanting to go into sex work but never doing it.
• Sex 2.0 anxiety and how I am really worried that once again I’ll end up doing everything even though it’s supposed to be a committee, but I can’t write about that because I have to be all diplomatic because I’m the founder and there are certain things I can’t say because I’m a figurehead, or something. And, more generally, how people drop the ball and let me down a lot and have done so throughout my life, and it’s a pattern, and I hate it.
• Kind of along the same lines as the disability thing, calling myself an abuse survivor. I know that’s what I am but since I didn’t have physical bruises it’s not REALLY abuse, and it would be disrespectful to REAL abuse survivors to try to appropriate that, wouldn’t it? Etc.
• Posting old written journal entries for reflection. Sometimes it helps to see things typed out on the screen in a nice CMS interface, don’t ask. It just does, for me.
• How I don’t trust people who don’t share certain beliefs, because it’s not just theoretical nebulous “beliefs,” it’s the knowledge that if given the chance they would take control of my life away from me, and indeed they work every day to do so. Basically the same thing Apostate’s commenter says here.
• I mentioned this on Twitter the other day, but I am SO sick of whenever you bring up some instance of sexism, some dude is so quick to point out that that doesn’t happen JUST along gender lines! Some dude who is TOTALLY NOT SEXIST, btw. And don’t you forget it. He’s so not sexist, that he gets squeamish if you even mention sexism, and goes out of his way to show that it’s not “just” discrimination based on gender. Because that’s how we know it’s important, see? If it were JUST affecting women, JUST along gender lines, then it’s not a big deal, but once it affects men, well that’s a whole other story!

  But don’t mention this to him, because he is NOT SEXIST, and you’re a feminist who looks for reasons to get offended and sees things that aren’t there and you probably don’t shave your legs, either. Smile!

• I hate when men describe me as “angry.” Go fuck yourself. I need to be able to say my piece and not get pigeonholed in that oh so typically sexist way. And hey here’s a thought: if I do happen to be angry about something (different from ANGRY as my ENTIRE BEING) – maybe there’s a REASON for it, have you thought of that??
• I hate when people make jokes that are so old and have been said a million times and weren’t funny the first million times anyway. I should put “jokes” in snark quotes, to be more accurate. Do they really think they’re the first person to think of that? Do they really think they’re a laff riot?
• Can I tell you how little I care about social media marketing, personal branding, and all that other crap? Can I tell you how absolutely bored I am of conversations about strategies for viral marketing and being transparent?
• Work stuff that might get me dooced, but I probably wouldn’t even mention that on a friends-locked LiveJournal. That’s always been beyond the pale. -Well, except for that secret sex and job hunting Blogspot blog I used to have. But that’s another story.

There’s more but I’m forgetting it.

And to be fair part of why I haven’t written as much is time, but that’s also a cop-out as a full excuse, because if I didn’t feel so inhibited I would find the time. I would write this stuff instead of clicking around on Twitter and Tumblr and shit.

Monday stuff

All day I’ve been writing an epic blog post in my head, and now that I’m sitting here at the computer screen with a bit of time on my hands, I’m having performance anxiety. :P

~*~

This morning on the way to work, Rusty and I stopped at LottaFrutta. We drive by there every morning and always say we should go, and I’ve read nothing but good things about the place, so this morning we made a point to finally go. And it was awesome!! I’ve definitely found my new favorite place in Atlanta. I’m still thinking about the fruit cup with yogurt and granola I had this morning. There just aren’t many places where you can get really good, fresh fruit quickly and for a reasonable price – and certainly not at this quality! I chatted with the owner for a minute before we left, and she said that’s exactly why she opened the place – to fulfill what she was looking for and could only get all the way out on Buford Highway.

Before we went inside, when we got out of the car and were walking down the street, it just felt like one of those perfect moments. A beautiful day and I was with Rusty and everything was great. We watched some mockingbirds scuffle over a bite of food. Sometimes I think it would be great to live in that neighborhood, but I love our house and I know I can enjoy all the different parts of Atlanta without actually having to live there. But ever since the first time I went to Cabbagetown in 2005, I’ve just had a special feeling for that part of town. Of course, being with the person I love helps as well. And I think part of it is, some moments bring back a feeling from early 2005, when I hadn’t been in Atlanta long and was discovering lots of its treasures, but had been here long enough that I’d gotten past a lot of the rough stuff from 2004. I love it when I can recapture that feeling. I want to maximize those times and that feeling.

Back to Lottafrutta – in one corner, there was an “Energy Lemon” and I had to take a picture of it. The owner caught me in the act and was giving me a funny look, and I said, “I had to take a picture of your energy lemon.” She said, “That’s okay,” and I wondered if I’d committed a cultural faux pas. Probably not, but you never know.

~*~

Saturday was our housewarming party and it was a success. My mom was up for the weekend and had a good time. I’m still thinking about the delicious deviled eggs we made, and I think I’m going to make deviled eggs out of the 6 eggs leftover from the various cooking endeavors.

We definitely want to have people over fairly often – why not take advantage of our wonderful deck, back yard, and grill? But next time, people need to not leave the back door open! I get eaten up by mosquitoes enough as it is, even with mosquito repellent on and citranella candles and torches all around – I don’t need them inside the house, too! (And I don’t even want to talk about what would happen if a cockroach were to come inside. I would FLIP THE FUCK OUT, because that shit is NOT ON.) I will say, though, that even though they blatantly ripped off the WebMD logo, this BiteMD stuff does help after the fact.

At the party, Nikki pointed out that we have two pine trees in the back yard that are perfectly spaced to accommodate a hammock. As far as I’m concerned, this is going to become a top priority.

Sara’s Coca-Cola cupcakes were amazing, and she has posted the recipe on her blog.

My mom took a bunch of pictures and I still need to get them off my camera. I’m going to finally upgrade our DSL speed sometime this week after my most recent payment goes through, so after that, it shouldn’t be such an ordeal to upload pictures to Flickr. So, I don’t yet have pictures of the party to post, but I do have a picture of me with a weed that was taller than I am:

It grew in about 6 weeks in a corner of our back yard.

~*~

The woman who did the renovation on our house (I would say “the seller,” but since we bought it in January, that seems a little dated now) came to the party, and she was telling me all about what the house looked like when she bought it (mostly because I kept prodding her with questions). I find it fascinating. I asked if she would send me “before” pictures, and she was reluctant, saying that usually when people see the before pictures, they like their house less. I find that really bizarre. If anything, I would think it would make someone like their nice renovated house more. My mom told her I was used to it because I grew up w/ parents who renovated houses, so I saw the whole process. That seemed to make her feel better about it. I need to email her a reminder. Anyway, one of the things she said was that they built out the dining room onto what used to be part of the porch. (They did a fabulous job with the floor, because you cannot tell AT ALL where the original hardwoods end and the new hardwoods begin.) That would mean the original dining area was tiny! Barely enough room to fit any kind of table, much less one that would comfortably seat four people. She also said there was a door from the kitchen into the middle bedroom (what we made our bedroom). Trying to picture everything, it seems like this was a really weird house.

I’ll post the before pictures when I get them. For now, Google Maps shows a blurry version of the house in its pre-renovation state, and the porch does indeed wrap around:

I’m glad they got rid of that big stupid shrub in front of the living room window.

~*~

Speaking of things you can see on Google Maps…

Here’s the aerial view of where my birthday photo shoot took place:

Street names are cropped out since there seems to be some sort of urban explorers’ code of ethics in that regard, although if you really want to know where it is, it’s not exactly hard to find out.

You can track the path of a utility easement for as long as there are treetops to be cut away to accommodate its presence. I followed it for probably longer than I should admit.

And one of the places I followed it to was this, in Clayton County. What the hell is this?? It looks disgusting!

I can only assume (hope?) that it’s a sewage treatment plant or some other waste water facility?

Back in Dekalb, there’s what appears to be a giant dirt lot, right beside “Lake Charlotte,” which appears not to have any water. Or maybe the dirt lot is the former lake?

Shifting gears, Google Maps also has a (blurry, not so great) pictures of an early 1960s condo building that I love, and that I fear might not be long for this world, given all the development going on in that area. Here’s Brookwood Forrest:

One of the condos is for sale – $85,000 will get you a 2/1 in a prime location. Parquet flooring has never endeared itself to me, but I could deal…

Besides, look at those original features in the bathroom!!

I’m dying to see what the kitchen and bathrooms looked like in our house prior to the renovation.

Here’s another condo building I love, this one built in 1950 according to the MLS Listing where I got the following photos. This building is on 26th St., right behind the Mellow Mushroom where we used to play trivia. Every time we would go to trivia I’d see the place and think what a cool building it is.

If I were single and buying a place by myself, these are the kinds of places I would have given serious consideration.

I used to not much care for 50s and 60s architecture, but in the past several years it has grown on me. Sure, some of it is crap; but there’s also a lot of really neat stuff. I think my resentment toward the “urban renewal” from which many buildings of that era were borne colored my perception and made me not able to appreciate the unique features in those buildings. It’s not the buildings’ fault that they replaced something older and probably very cool in its own right. And it doesn’t mean we should continue the cycle of knocking it all down and starting over every ~30 years or so.

~*~

I’m going to wrap this up and keep this post relatively upbeat. This is only a smidgen of everything that’s been typing itself out in my head all day long. I don’t have the energy right now to write a screed about why I’m annoyed with pretty much everybody in my former feminist Blogdonia haunts, not to mention the bullshit happening on Tumblr right now. And I feel like I should save my post about my constant underlying fear of Something Very Bad Happening for another day. (The truth is, I’m scared to write it at all.)

Quote of the day: Feminism 101 edition

A relative oldie but a goodie, and one that people need to read over and over. I know I’ve posted it before, but it bears repeating, especially lately.

From Melissa at Shakesville:

The truth is, if I actually spent my days actively paying attention to every example of misogyny around me, I would be a profoundly unhappy woman. Not bitchy or grumpy or short-tempered, but paralyzingly depressed. Women have to train themselves to avoid consciously reacting to every bit of misogynistic detritus permeating the culture through which we all move, lest they go quite insane. I write about the things I can’t not write about. If I wrote about all the examples of sexism I see every day, I’d never sleep.

Tangentially, the idea that addressing “the little things,” like being told to smile or misogynistic t-shirts, somehow demeans feminism or distracts from “real” or “serious” sexism is utterly, completely, devilishly wrong.

Feminism seeks to address all manner of issues, big and small. That women can (and do) utilize the tenets of feminism in every aspect of their lives does not undermine the history of the feminist movement, but instead does it a great honor. Feminism was never meant to be restricted to suffrage and equal pay, held in reserve like a finite quantity that could run out if it’s used for “the little things.” Feminism is a renewable resource.

The idea that feminism should be kept under glass, broken only in case of a “real” and “serious” emergency, is predicated on the erroneous assumption that “the little things” happen in a void, as do, presumably, the “real” and “serious” things, when, in reality, they are interwoven strands of the same rope. And as soon as one begins to judge the worthiness of feminists’ attention on a sliding scale, even generally-regarded “serious issues” like equal pay are dwarfed by global concerns like sex trafficking or government-sanctioned use of rape as a tool of war. It doesn’t have to be one or the other—feminists can multi-task.

Read the full post.