Am I the only person who thinks living on the moon is a stupid idea? Don't get me wrong: I absolutely love the moon. In fact, you could even say it saved my life. But that doesn't make me want to live on its freezing, airless expanse.

According to CNN, though, an "international" team of scientists thinks this kind of, ahem, lifestyle, can and should be pursued. Let's live in a lava tube on the moon, they assert, especially since it's protected from the harsh temperatures found on the surface!

I know an even better way to avoid freezing our asses off in outer space. Stay home. Lest you think me a curmudgeonly luddite, well you are probably right on some level, but rest assured my opposition to our proposed lunar colony has nothing to do with a generalized dislike of technology nor does it reflect a simplistic desire to oppose any plan I didn't come up with myself.

Instead, my reasons are twofold, rational and spiritual.

First, the reasonable reason not to live on the moon. Life as we know it does not exist there. I know we are saturated with fantasies of outer space romps--Avatar only the latest in a long series of such narratives, including some of my earliest memories sitting down to family dinner while the stoic pointy-eared guy and his humorless buddy battling space-babes and cheaply-costumed monsters on television --but in reality, nothing suggests that we would thrive outside of the environment in which we evolved. Nothing. Instead we would need to import the necessities, air and water being the two most salient, in order to dummy up a version of, well, earth. So why not stay here instead of building Potemkin villages on the moon?

The second reason for leaving the moon alone, the spiritual one, stems from something that happened to me when my mom was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 1995. I was used to using my intelligence to solve problems, and I was pretty good at it. I'd scored a couple of college degrees (BA, MA), was closing in on the big one (PhD), and so prided myself on being able to reason with the best of them. (See, for example, the excellent reasoning in the previous paragraph where I point out that living on the moon is a stupid idea because the environment there would in every way be inimical to our flourishing, lava tube or nay.)

So faced with my precious mom's devastating diagnosis, I jumped on this problem like I did every other, setting out to fix it by learning everything I could about the disease and changing everything I could about her diet, thoughts, medication, and habits, in order to save her life by curing this vicious cancer.

But there was only one problem. It didn't work. Mom got sicker. The tumors continued to sprout. Making her eat raw onion juice only caused her to puke. Nobody was happy with me. I didn't know what to do.

In an ironic twist, I found my answer in yet another attempt to force her to get better. I had read in the various Bernie Siegel-type fix-your-sickness books which I was madly consuming that it was important to have a relaxed mental state in order for your immune system to work optimally. So I dragged my mom off to meditation. This was not something I had ever done before or had any interest in doing now. Reason was my cure-all. All the other stuff was voodoo bunk for pansies.

But this was about my mom's life, so I loaded her fragile body into the car and drove over to the Robert and Beverly Lewis Cancer Care Center in Pomona for the visualization classes I had hard about when I was bringing her there for radiation treatments. Even though I attended only to fix my mom, I went ahead and did the hour-long meditation, listening as the leader instructed us to go down a flight of ten imaginary stairs and into a safe place only we had access to. Always the excellent student, I did as I was told. And when the lights came up an hour later, I was a changed woman. I didn't know the stress I was under, trying to make the world spin the way I wanted--needed--it to. This brief glimpse into another way of living, the practice of letting go, made me hungry for more. And I have gotten it.

So what's all this got to do with the moon? Because I realized reason wasn't enough, and could in fact be way too much, I needed to find a way to balance it with something else, the ineffable, the intuitive. For religious people this balance is easily achieved by adherence to theologies that explain everything--explain the ineffable even--and then offer a path to follow in order to have that sense of personal powerlessness necessary to temper ego. There's a big old god, he's mad and nice, do this and not that, blah blah blah.

No, clearly I am not cut out for religious obedience. Why? Well, I am a Scorpio, I am a Feminist, I am the descendant of revolutionaries on both sides, I'm an intellectual, I come from an alcoholic family tree--none of these things predispose one to a love of authority. So mindless adherence to somebody else's god wasn't going to work. And mindlessness is absolutely necessary.

This is where the moon fits in. Desperate to find a way to make sense of the nonsensical--mom is sick, her bones are sprouting tumors, I can't fix this, she doesn't deserve it--I chose to surrender to the forces of the universe over which I am powerless. And the most obvious of these, to me, is this visible moon, looming over us in the sky. I didn't hang it. I don't know who did. I don't know why it is there or we are here. I don't know what is going to happen, today, tomorrow, a hundred years from now, when I die, when you die, none of it.

And in my admission of this ignorance, I found--and find--bliss.

Mom died. So will I. So will you. But I am happy to say that when she died, I had become safe for her to be around. I wasn't trying to fix, or blame, or scold. I wasn't pretending she was going to get better anymore--which she thanked me for. I wasn't planning on revenge against her doctor for blowing off the back pain that turned out to be myeloma.

I was in acceptance. I continue to be. And the moon makes all of this possible.

So leave it alone. Get honest. Admit your powerlessness over gravity. Your need for oxygen. And get grateful. For what we have, not for what we don't. When all else fails, and that big nasty ego comes in to tell you that you have all the answers, look up at the moon and honestly answer this question: did you hang it?

Then leave it alone. And join me in living joyously on this green planet. Oh, and, there's plenty here that needs attention, in case you haven't noticed.

by Diana York Blaine at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ireland has passed a new blasphemy law to protect religion from bullies. Guess they never heard the children's rhyme that begins with "stick and stones."

The Irish Atheists have responded with a list of 25 now illegal comments made by the likes of Bjork and Jesus.

Happy New Year everybody! And I do mean everybody.

by Diana York Blaine at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Of all the thousands of people who attended the memorial service at Staples Center, I was perhaps the least likely. Yet there I was, sandwiched between two young friends and a middle-aged stranger, each of whom spent the entire event in various stages of grief. I, on the other hand, frequently found myself rolling my eyes, careful to keep my face averted from those I loved who had come because they loved him.

Him. When I think of Michael Jackson, a montage of images rolls across my eyes, a most appropriate form of memory for our mediated age. I see him young, singing Rocking Robin, I see him in adolescence, crooning to a rat. Then the images grow increasingly bizarre, his nose smaller, his outfits shinier, his face whiter, his makeup heavier, until he becomes a kind of Norma Desmond with a dollop of Lon Cheney.

What I do not think of is a hero, a man who made me believe in myself, someone who brought the world together, a civil rights leader. And yet these were unmistakably the ways in which Jackson was eulogized, both by the very famous faces on stage and by my twenty-something friends, each of whom had a connection to this stranger that I can only describe as visceral. For example, after Brooke Shields addressed his children by name, "Prince, Paris, [pause pause[, Blanket," I turned in merriment to my companion-- only to find tears pouring out of her eyes. It was too late for me to stop my snarky comment, which came out something like "ok you have to admit the Blanket thing is kind of weird." "No," she said, "I understand it, because a blanket is something you cover yourself with that is comforting."

Ah. Got it. Michael Jackson was not weird. My friend said so. Brooke said so. Al Sharpton said so ("Wasn't nothin' strange about your daddy"). Magic Johnson said so ("he ate KFC!"). A representative from congress even showed up to say so: "In America, you are innocent until you are proven guilty!" As my eyebrows shot back onto my skull, the crowd roared its applause and leapt to a standing ovation.

I stood too but only so that I could continue to watch this fascinating spectacle, one for a man I think was very, very strange. Or was it me? I had to start to wonder. Why did all these people love this person while I felt nothing? Had I ever cared about a celebrity like this? I thought back to John Lennon, how stunned I had been by his murder, how sad I had felt that someone who also had a message of peace had been cut down in his prime. I would probably have gone to a memorial, if it had been in Los Angeles that is. If it wasn't too hard to get to. If it wasn't too big of a hassle. No, even for Lennon, I did not feel an urge to join some crowd and emote.

So while I am apparently not the type of person to become wrapped up in the life of someone I don't know (which perhaps explains my apathy to Christianity), I am aware of reasons that Jackson mattered. To my young friends, he was a symbol of love. To African-Americans, he symbolized the further erosion of racial barriers, the possibility of massive success and acceptance available to them in the United States in spite of our ugly prejudices. And I suppose to the world he represented the fantastic possibilities inherent in freedom, even the possibility of erasing your racial characteristics and building a theme park as your private residence. I guess you could say Michael Jackson was America.

Since the event I have not found any new intense connection to this stranger, no more than I have to anyone I don't know. (I did feel a pang for him when Chris Martin sang a forlorn acoustic "Billy Jean" at the recent Coldplay concert. See, I am not entirely without heart!) Yet I remain interested in him because I am a scholar and I know when someone makes this big of an impact on the world (knocking the Iran rebellion off the cnn.com headlines for days on end, continuing to be in the news every day), there's something terribly important about him-- whether I think so or not.

by Diana York Blaine at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Hey y'all. Somebody hacked into my site! I'm flattered in a this-is-how-you-know-you-exist-in-the-digital-age kinda way. It's like getting t-p'd. (It's too early in the morning to figure out how to spell that one).

Anyway the site would still be silent but for an angel named Shawn who swooped in to save the day! Thank you kind sir. I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.

So, glad to be back, to have a placed to rant, and to have foiled the evil Trojan Horse implanting hacker!

Ha!

xoxo

dyb

by Diana York Blaine at 8:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I just spent an amazing holiday weekend having fun with friends. We dressed up as the cast of the Wizard of Oz, with yours truly as the Wicked Witch. After handing out candy to various charmingly dressed young people, we went to a dance where I realized that on some fundamental level I have always needed to be holding a broom while I boogied.

Our Dorothy, a radiant young friend of mine, cut out early, before the costume contest. I felt a moment of panic--what's the cast of the Wizard of Oz without Ms Gale? But this problem was quickly solved: another Dorothy was at hand. She too was dressed in blue and white checked gingham. She too had put her hair in pigtails. She would definitely do. There was, however, one fundamental difference between her rendition of this character and ours.

She was Slutty Dorothy.

Now this was an adult dance. And I am certainly no prude. We took first prize and were wildly popular, Slutty Dorothy or no. But it did lead me to ruminate one more time on the bizarre turn that Halloween has taken. I don't mean the by now accepted fact that women feel free to express themselves in erotic ways on this holiday. I mean the unaccountable tarting up of characters that don't have any association with sexuality. Like the tin man for example. As I was cruising the internet for ideas, I was dismayed and perplexed when I ran across a Slutty Tin Man costume. Huh? No, it wasn't even for men, the MAN in Tin Man notwithstanding. The outfit consisted of a tiny tin tube, allowing for maximum exposure of female flesh. I'm sorry, this is just weird.

I've seen Slutty Bumblebees, Slutty Raggedy Anns, Slutty Cowboys--the list goes on and on. In fact, Christa Getz, the purchasing director of Buycostumes.com says that 90-95% of all female costumes send a sexual message. The company has had to break their "sexy" category into three divisions this year just to accommodate all the erotica!

Isn't it lovely to think that women are getting in touch with our sexuality? Isn't it hard to believe that this is what the corporate co-opting and commodification of Halloween means? Yep it is. I believe that this show of flesh is less a sign that we are free than proof that we remain trapped in limited definitions of what it means to be a woman. What if we weren't attracting male attention? What if we expressed ourselves in non-sexual ways? What if, what if, what if?

I'll tell you what if. We'd be having an amazing time. How do I know? Because this is exactly what I have been doing for the last few years. I have gone on Slutty Strike. Let other women convince you that they want to be your Slutty Cavegirl. I would rather please myself than you. And the results are marvelous.

It started last year when my friend Jan and I decided to be Thing 1 and Thing 2 from the Cat in the Hat. This decision directly assaulted the unspoken but pervasive dictate that we signal our sexual attractiveness in extreme ways on Halloween. As I dressed for the evening, in an enormous red bag, with a blue fright wig and whiteface, I was unsure how it would feel to mingle with a roomful of sexy women and the men they were trying to attract. Well, it felt great! I'd never danced so freely, I'd never felt so free, I'd never been as free. It was one of the best nights of my life.

Oh yeah and we attracted a lot of attention and won the costume contest.

But the victory for me was an internal one. I don't have to make you think that I am hot to feel valuable or special or deserving. YAY! Let me repeat that. YAY!

And lest you think that one middle-aged woman's personal victory over her own internalized sexism is a private matter, please note that the sexualization of Halloween costumes for women has now extended itself down into the girl category, with elementary school aged females feeling pressured to be sexy on Halloween. Yes, you read that right. According to GenderPac, "The traditional pirate, witch, and school teacher costumes for girls now have a sexy or vixen undertone to them. Costumes are outfitted with miniskirts, leather high-heel boots, shirts that expose the mid drift, low-cut corsets, and other overtly sexualized accessories."

I look back on my childhood Halloweens, when I was an old man (with a full beard my wonderful brother Pete, a theater major, affixed hair by hair), a pair of dice (with my friend James), a hippie (with a sign that said "don't trust anyone over 8). I was free to let my imagination run wild and I did. I was whatever clever thing I could think of. What I wasn't was Slutty. How lovely to come full circle, to get to play with the freedom of a child and hand this sexist culture back its imperative that I define myself--and our girl children--as objects of sexual desire.

Won't you join me next year?

by Diana York Blaine at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I live in a really lovely little town. It was founded in the early twentieth century for the citrus trade by folks who recreated their midwestern homes, building charming little bungalows with front porches and river rock foundations. They planted lots of trees. They left lots of room for parks.

And they made way for lots of hate.

I know everyone doesn't think like I do, doesn't share my belief in freedom for women, in equality for homosexuals, in peace not war. Still, I have to admit I have been shocked by the signs that have popped up in my neighborhood advocating a ban on gay marriage and advocating the election of conservative John McCain and his anti-female female running mate. Their houses look so cute. How can the ideas propounded therein be so ugly?

I already knew weird religious people lived on my street because every single morning I pass the signs in their window that call me a murderer for having elected to exercise my right to safe and legal abortion. Sometimes I feel hurt, sometimes I feel angry, sometimes I feel compassion, sometimes I feel nothing. But always I wonder why they think they know better than I do about what I am capable of handling, and I also wonder why their religion promotes self-righteousness instead of love of neighbor.

Still as I have grown used to this omnipresent scold, I deluded myself into thinking that they were some kind of exception, that all the other pretty bungalows were filled with people who understand that the fundamental freedoms we enjoy in this country are indeed what makes America great and that trying to erode them would be tantamount to trying to destroy our very nation.

Well I was wrong and they are trying.

So what can I do besides voting my conscience? It occurred to me that I could take pictures of these signs with me in the photo and blog about the consternation I feel every time I pass a house filled with people who want to take away my self-determination and that of my gay friends. And so I am.

The other Dr Blaine agreed to act as photog for the mission, so we set out on this picture-perfect day through our beautiful neighborhood filled with flowers and trees and birds and.... anti-woman, anti-peace and anti-gay messages. First stop I knew would be that house on the corner, the one I pass every single day with the huge message ABORTION IS HOMICIDE. I often feel impotent looking at the sign, as I know I have no intention of going to them and saying the various things I think of saying, some asking for understanding, some sarcastic, some flat-out mean.

Finally today I got to "do" something about it. I got to get my picture taken in front of their house in my "this is what a feminist looks like" tee-shirt. And I got to hold up a sign that says "thanks for hating." It felt real good.

We moved on to the Yes on 8 house that I see when I come home from Target. It has little stick figures of a happy family, clearly one that doesn't include abortion-loving feminists or their fag friends. I smiled real pretty for this one, holding up my Thanks for Hating sign. Finally I was starting to feel ok about things.

The last stop was a double-winner, both Yes on 8 and McCain/Palin. But this one didn't go as smoothly as had the other two. The minute I stepped onto the lawn (which I knew was trespassing btw), a man shot out of the house and demanded to know what I was doing. I was prepared for this. I smiled sweetly and said "taking a picture of your sign for my blog." By now wife had joined him, holding baby (not aborted and one hopes for her sake not gay). Wife screamed "get off our property." "Of course," I said, complying immediately. Like I said I knew stepping on someone's grass was indefensible, so I hopped to the curb.

I pointed out to my hubby that we could easily still take the picture from the sidewalk. This is where it gets fun. As soon as I said that the man demanded that we leave that spot as well. We nicely said that he doesn't own the sidewalk. Well, that was news to this anti-gay marriage pro-republican La Verne homeowner! "Yes I do," he screamed. "You can't just go around taking pictures of anything!" And the wife added "you are the ones who are hating!" (Apparently she had noticed my sign. Sheepish smile....)

Anyway by now we had our photo and were headed to the car, but we also kept calmly repeating "it's still a free country." The irony is not lost on me, and I hope it's not lost on you either. These people want to determine who can marry, who can abort, and who we should kill overseas. So why should they stop there? They also want to prevent people standing on public property from taking pictures of signs posted in the public sphere.

Maybe they can get that measure on the ballot as well.

by Diana York Blaine at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)