…it’s one of the oldest and biggest gay-rights organizations. I’d been thinking of joining for years but never quite got around to it, so when the earnest young man turned up on my doorstep with a clipboard, I signed up immediately. And took one of their bumper stickers (dark blue with a yellow = on it) to put on my car.
It’s Pride Week, of course, with the SF Pride Parade on Sunday. This will be the first time in three years that I haven’t been riding as part of the AIDS Lifecycle contingent, and I find myself with curiously mixed feelings. I’m sorry I won’t be riding, because it’s tremendous fun (especially with the crowd cheering for us), but it’s also my first chance to see the Pride Parade in all its glory–when you’re in the parade, you don’t get to see all the floats go by. So I’m really looking forward to it.
And joining the HRC seems like one of the best possible ways to celebrate Pride. So many of my friends (and mentors!) are gay and lesbian–I should have done this years before. Gay rights are very important to me, it’s about getting fundamental human rights for my friends and (chosen) family.
I have now decided that I don’t really like the color combinations on the tiger shawl I’ve been handspinning–the color striping is great, but it takes away from the lily design. So I’m seriously considering shifting to a white silk yarn and handpainting the shawl afterwards. I’m knitting test swatches in a 20/2 machine-spun silk yarn. If that works, I may knit the tiger shawl in machine-spun yarn rather than handspun…mostly for time reasons. If I weren’t working on the book, I could afford the time to handspin it, but I do want to finish it in a year or two.
Still musing over it, though.
I am also fairly happy today. I spent an hour talking to the VP whose group I’ll wind up in post-reorg, and upon delicately inquiring what layoffs were going to be involved, he said, “Let’s just say that you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation if I thought you wouldn’t be here in two weeks.” Whew. I’m not on the list. Major relief.
I am, however, not happy about the constriction of my role, and I plan to talk to my coach/career counselor about it next week. Hugh has been incredibly good at helping me get my life back together (because the whole thing exploded messily about two years ago and it’s nowhere near back to normal yet) and also at giving me advice on corporate maneuvering. Oddly, he was the guy who got me back to dating. (All these wonderful gay men in my life have been trying to get me back to dating–which is very sweet of them, since there’s absolutely NOTHING in it for them.) I had been waxing morose over the fact that I really wanted to date a pair of bi guys, but where on earth was I going to find them, and he said, “I know just the place!” and pointed me at Craigslist. Lo and behold, there they were.
Anyway, a lot of what he’s doing centers around work-life balance, or more accurately, reminding me that there is such a thing as fun. The last couple years have been so difficult that there hasn’t been much room for fun–mostly just a desperate struggle to survive. So he keeps reminding me to do things like go out for movies and such. Hopefully at some point I’ll start enjoying living again.
(One of the reasons I am pessimistic about my chances of reaching sixty is that it isn’t just a matter of a single crisis; it’s a year or two of acute suffering, and then two or three years of slowly rebuilding my life from ground zero. Then I get four or five good years before my life crashes again. Makes you wonder if it’s worth it, it really does.)
Tomorrow I’m going up to the farmer’s market, and then I may continue on to Dharma Trading Company in San Rafael. A friend is having a tie-dye party on Sunday (after the Pride Parade) and I want to see if they have anything interesting to dye…also, I want to see if they have any 20/2 silk yarn, or reeled silk yarn, or something I can knit with.
I did get a nice white cotton bathrobe already, though, and I plan to tie-dye that. I bought a wonderful fluffy white bathrobe while I was in college, and had it tie dyed–it’s gorgeous and I love it, but it’s also 16 years old and threadbare. So I’m going to try dyeing myself a new one. If the first attempt doesn’t work, I’ll just overdye it black, and discharge-dye it.
And if I have time, I’m going to try that strawberry-balsamic-vinegar-purple-basil jam I’ve been wanting to try. Life is pretty short, though.
Tien
