   Current Post On Trae’s Blog:
My grandmother died last night. This wasn't a shock or a surprise. Her health has been on the decline, and she's been in hospice for the last month. She lived a long life, and in her final days she was surrounded by her three adult children.
My grandma was a kind woman. She wasn't perfect, but I always felt loved in her presence. She was a retired kindergarten teacher, and was still working when I was a kid. I have so many happy memories sitting at her kitchen table, and I'm going to carry those with me for the rest of my life. She was also proof that anyone who claims that you get more conservative as you get older is full of shit, because she certainly didn't.
I think it's interesting how the body processes grief sometimes. I don't know that I'll cry, but over the past month, knowing this was coming, I've felt a tension in my gut. Now that she's passed, instead of relief that tension is replaced by a sense of emptiness. That something is missing that should still be there. Something has been taken away, and I feel it.
Of course, as I wrote that, I immediately started crying... so I guess my body processes grief in pretty ordinary ways too.
I wanted to come up with something profound linking this to Beltane, which we sit in the middle of right now, but it just seemed hackneyed. Like I was trying to dig out some greater significance when the truth is death comes whenever it wants. The only predictable thing about it is that it's the end of all of our journeys. I hope that when I pass I'm so lucky to have lived such a long life with people that I love around me in my final days.
For the record, I will be fine. I just needed to get these words out while they were still in my head. I don't have some rousing conclusion or deep insight to tack on here at the end, just that gut feeling that something is missing.
Because it is.
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Sometimes just saying “Doin stuff” gets the point across well enough that you can stay relatively on the more appropriate side of a conversation so it doesn’t turn into a conversation on your sex life. Also Sarah must be very nervous to talk about all of this.
Good show, Sarah.
Language can be weird. There’s this mental block of ‘that’s a bad word, don’t say that word’ that lingers long after you’ve gotten used to whatever the word refers to.
Straight and not straight are not the only options, just sayin’.
Well technically they ARE — in the same sense that everything is either directly to your left or not directly to your left. Or everything is located in Des Moines or NOT located in Des Moines. Or all words rhyme with Mellon or they don’t rhyme with mellon. 😛
You do realize that one of the two characters in this conversation is asexual, right?
Actually, Trae’s right.
However, straight and gay are not the only options.
Exactly
While “straight and gay are not the only options” is certainly better phrasing, I disagree with the notion that “straight or not straight” is like the examples Trae gives above. The big differences is that unlike leftwardness or locations in cities, sexuality is a spectrum, so binary negation is just not applicable.
My examples work fine in the sense of “strict definition”/”not strict definition” — which is really the whole point. If you want to get into analyzing the need for looking at things as a binary (which is a complicated ball of wax) my “left” example still totally works… with the left/right binary and all.
Anywho, Ruth says what she says because Sarah made a pretty specific declaration a while back.
well damn thats oddly mature of her