whoa is me

Today's moment of whoa: stumbling upon a non-swarthy fellow's blog entry and realizing that Granovetter heads up "Stnaford's" sociology department.

Yesterday's moment of whoa: tracing through the intellectual lineage of Mongrel and ca-noodling through Zed's old blog.

Yesteryesterday of whoa: grasping the zazen of Xen.

Now, time for some woe.

It's been a little challenge for me to get used to being privately disparaged in a public place, here on TheIsland and back in TheValley. It has happened some dozen times in the last thirty days, in the same dialect of the same language.

The slurs are "private" in that they are not in English and yet "public" in that I hear the insults on campus, in the park, or at the shopping center. They are private in that those that disparage me talk only to each other, and yet public in that I very well understand the language that they speak.

I would say I am fluid in this other tongue, but even if I weren't, I think my language parsing skills are leet enough to trust my rough sense of across-language insult. (In some particular order, I believe I can tell when I'm being disparaged in English, Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, Thai, Body Language, Chinese (Cantonese), and Tagalog.)

I was called out once more last night, in the secrecy of public spaces and private languages, and I thought of how to make the best of this. I thought of how these slurs remind me that race, class, gender, and sexuality /exist/ even if we act as if they didn't.

When I grew up here on TheIsland, I grew up without having the language to talk about race, gender, class, oppression, and power, although I didn't realize that at the time. That makes me sad in that I know how much energy I spent trying to figure my way out of these invisible boxen, and at least unsad in that it is better to now know than to have never known at all...