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Happy New Year, friends!

I don’t like the idea of resolutions, as there is a lot of negativity when it comes to personal reform/the eradication of habits/fixing “problems” within ourselves. Instead, I like to make a list of things I am working on or looking forward to in the coming year, as I know that many of the parts of me that may fall under resolutions are bound to change as I go through the ups and downs of life (and some may not change, and I’m okay with that, too).

In 2014, I am excited to:

  • Work on the 2014 Inside Out LGBT Film Festival
  • Work on a World Pride film festival initiative with Inside Out, TIFF, and U of T
  • Learn how to box
  • Make music
  • Have an art show
  • Start and finish a quilt with all of my fabric from Rwanda and Egypt
  • Spend more time with my family while I’m living in Toronto for the next six months
  • Travel to Iceland
  • Move to Vancouver
  • Take some weekend camping trips in B.C.
  • Potentially travel to India or Southeast Asia for part of the winter holidays

(Also of interest is this “fuck it” list).

Wishing you all lots of love, light, and adventure in 2014.

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For many people — not just activists like Snowden or professional athletes — life crests early. But it doesn’t end there. It goes on, burdened by a summit that can never be reached again, which one can gaze upon only by turning back. This is not to say that good and worthwhile things will not happen to them, and for a fortunate few there will be other, higher summits. For many, however, those earlier moments will be a quiet haunting, a reminder of what has been and cannot be again.

We might think of these kinds of lives, lives whose trajectories have early peaks and then fall off, as exceptional. In a way they are. But in another way they are not. There is something precisely in the extremity of these lives that brings out a phenomenon that appears more subtly for the rest of us. It appears in different times and different places and under different guises, but it is there for us nevertheless…

… A certain period in the arc of one’s life yields a meaning that illuminates it, makes it burn more brightly than perhaps one might have thought or had the right to expect, and then is over. One continues to live, but something has gone missing, it has gotten lost. And what is lost, what is missing, remains nevertheless, tugging at one’s world with its absence.

Others will object to these reflections from another angle. There are, I will be reminded, riches in many lives that do not constitute a peak or a summit — friendships, love relationships, meaningful careers. In their stability, these seem more nearly immune to the ravages of a trajectory of early peaks followed by endless valleys. This is certainly true, but it neglects an important element of those quieter riches: they are not themselves steady. Love has its own peaks and valleys, and once past a certain peak one cannot know whether there will be another one. Friendships do as well. We understand this because we all have friends with whom memories are the central point of contact. These are defunct friendships, pointed toward a time that, once vibrant, no longer exists. The same can be said of careers. Even the most meaningful careers leave one wondering, after the exhaustion of a project or the reward of recognition, will it ever be this good again?

Source.

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What is it about femininity that makes people hate on a queer? On a person? Confession: I’ve kinda dismissed femme-invisibility. I always kinda thought “femme invisibility” was some bullshit, like bullshit enough to use quotation marks whenever I mentioned it. Sometimes, I’m a fucked up humanoid  living in my own world and totally checked out to things that aren’t my life. Me acknowledging something doesn’t make it all of a sudden valid, it makes me all the more ready to stand up and feel frayed by humanity, by my own oblivion, by a shred of privilege I try to ignore cuz everything else is so much bigger. I always unfortunately translated femme-invisibility as a holler thang aka something that has to do with your ability to get hollered at, to get flirted with, to get your shine on. I didn’t equate FI with fucking community. COMMUNITY. Community is the thing we all need to survive.

Source.