Hi y'all! I'm baaaaaaack.

It's been nearly a year since I blogged last. Sorry, different priorities. But I am ready to scream into the void again feel like it's time to start engaging in this platform again with my opinions on this human culture, pop and otherwise.

A couple of things on my mind to catch you up with where I'm at -- some timely, some not so much:

1) If you're not sick of it already, how you doin', Game of Thrones?

Big fan of the books here, even though GRRM's writing evokes a massive clusterfuck; as such, I was really impressed with how the showrunners streamlined it into a lithe and springy animal. And yes, I acknowledge the depiction of unnecessary and added violence (particularly sexual) against women has clearly become lazy knee-jerk writing and a turnoff. That's why Outlander is where I've been getting my epic sword fighting fantasy lately, as well as really digging that a 70-year old white man is outdoing these young bucks in engaging a female audience.

(via Feminist Mad Max)

But, me = digression; back to brass tacks. I have been a bit reluctant to rejoin the world of GRRM because clusterfuck and because even with how overly rapey it is, the show seems to still be making that clusterfuck feel more cohesive. Reading not being a lot of humans to-do list anyway (boo!), I do also think that I'm not alone among people who still do enjoy reading. So, this:

Stop Defending "Game of Thrones": How HBO Gutted the Stories I Love

UGH. This shit is all over the internets. A slow build, from tweets his editor put up and took down, to GRRM's slow boil from happy go lucky collaborator to tsk tsker. Funny how this happens only prior to release of the next book. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I see this phenomenon we are experiencing as an orchestrated way to generate renewed interest in the books. This is a huge franchise with lots of big players and massive money to be made, not a bunch of amateurs squabbling over scraps. If this crap really exists and it's not helpful to the machine, it gets locked down. Bleh.

Speaking of clusterfucks...

2) Rachel Dolezal: Black or White? A Woman's Story Stirs Up a Furor

I have been ignoring this story because it IS complicated, but a friend who is a creative writing professor and someone who has personally struggled with issues within her mixed family posted this bit to the Friendface from her friend, and it spoke to me.

Transracial Lives Matter: Rachel Dolezal and the Privilege of Racial Manipulation

It's a powerful piece of writing with some controversial ideas. To get the negatives out of the way first: I am a bit uncomfortable with the some of the more aggressive attitudes she shares regarding transracial adoption -- that there's somehow always an injustice that was done to the child, or the idea that seems to be put forth here that adoptive parents are complicit in destroying a child's potential identity if they involve them in white culture or should be ridiculed if they try to seek out ways to incorporate their child's racial or ethnic background in their daily lives. Another friend also pointed out that her only problem with this article is that the author says Dolezal adopted her black brother to gain authenticity, and how could this person possibly know why Dolezal did this, why can't it just be out of love? I, like my friend, am more inclined to think love might have had something to do with it. Nothing is perfect, and I always feel like love is completely divorced from a lot of these conversations.

Anyway, I wasn't adopted, but I was just talking to my husband about this within the context of my experience growing up as a biracial girl in a very small town, all-white environment. My parents both prepared and tried to heal me the best they could for how I was treated, and I identify with a lot of what she is saying. It is very hard for anyone who has an outside that looks like the dominant culture to understand what that privilege is truly like, and I say this as someone who has had the ability in the past to "pass" -- and let me tell you, I did it when I could because it DOES grant you privilege.

I get really tired though, and sometimes feel like the best way is what a white male friend from my hometown commented:

I'm so salty toward people's judgments at all anymore. I'm like an old man that's done caring about stuff like "opinions" grumble grumble life is too valuable. Let's get it over with and just say, "does it increase diversity or not?" If not, then let's not do that thing.

If only life was so simple. Can it be? Not until we all stop caring about judgments, which is a defining aspect of being human.