I knew all week that today was going to be Blog Action Day, where anyone dedicated to caring for our environment was supposed to use their blog space on the Internet to put in their two cents for environmental action, thereby presenting an impressive collective vision of the numbers of us out here that care about such things. Not a bad idea. And I have been thinking about it all week, wondering what to say, what I could possibly add that would make my contribution any different than what anyone else might have to say.

As I pondered this subject I remembered something I had not forgotten, but it had sort of gotten filed away under piles of other stuff in my memory and not been seen for a while. I remembered how my roots of activism on the subject of the environment went deeper than I had been giving myself credit for. I had forgotten about something that happened when I was fourteen years old, in my Freshman year of high school. After a lifetime of being the perennial misfit, I had that year finally found some measure of social acceptance with loosely-formed group that hung out on one of the school’s porches christened the “Smoking Lounge” because it was the one place the administration would permit students to smoke on campus. (That pretty much dates me right there doesn’t it?) This was 1971, and the smoking lounge crowd was a ragtag assemblage of latter-day hippies, long-haired greasers, and other assorted non-conformists who failed to fit into any of the other school cliques. I was definitely soundly in the latter-day hippie category ideologically, having been born about ten years too late and about 3000 miles too far to the East in Virginia. It was only due to dire threats of bodily harm from my parents that I had not joined some of my older compatriots and gone to Washington, DC that Spring for either of the two large protests against the Viet Nam War. In the spirit of brotherhood I wore my black armband and protest buttons, and helped organize walkouts of the school.

That Spring I remember feeling a driving need to participate in a larger way somehow, to do something more. In Eighth grade I had learned of the environment in peril in Earth Science class, and a gifted geography teacher in Freshman year had given me an increased sense of the world as an ecosystem, and our role in the community of Man. I decided that we as students needed to do something for our environment on the local level, something to help save our planet and demonstrate the courage of our convictions. Pretty big talk for a fourteen-year-old.

We came up with a catchy name for the group, which I now can’t remember (probably just as well), and looked around our town to see what needed to be done. My hometown has done one thing – and possibly only one thing - well in its headlong rush into urbanization in the past fifty years. It has one of the highest ratios of urban parkland to developed land of any city in the country, if not the highest, and its city parks are numerous and beautiful, especially the waterfront ones. We could plainly see that trash in the parks was an obvious problem, and that the source of most of it was the public’s casual careless littering. We suckered some print shop into printing up “anti-litter pledge cards” for us, bought rubber gloves and trash bags, and off we went.

We spent many Saturdays, Sundays, and afternoons after school trolling the city parks hectoring unsuspecting park visitors, discussing the trash problem with them, getting them to sign our pledge cards, and, yes, picking up trash. Bags and bags of trash. The reactions we received from people we spoke with while on this quest were varied: some just blew us off, some were politely amused, and some were genuinely impressed, even giving us money to help pay for supplies or buy ourselves refreshments on the warm spring days.

I suppose today’s teens would look at this voluntary action of ours and be appalled, considering it a chore they would only do if punished, if held “feets to the fire” by a community service order by the court, or a high school principal. We didn’t know any better – we did it, and would survey the improvement we saw when we would look around and see a lakefront or playground free of trash and looking pristine once again, and we would get a huge sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

The school year ended and my little group ended up scattering to the four winds as people got paying jobs, went to visit divorced parents, and so on. But I think that early experience had a profound effect on me, both on my dedication to the environment (which I admit I don’t do nearly as much about as I should), and on the idealistic belief I still have over thirty-five years later, that even in this screwed-up cynical world, with enough hope and dedication one person can still make a difference.

Just look at Al Gore if you don't believe me.

Note: I am doing this under protest, because on general principal I hate memes.
But Itainohime tagged me and I can't say no to the Itai, so here goes-- First, the rules.

1. Post these rules.
2. Each person tagged must post 8 random facts about themselves.
2. Tags should write a journal/blog of these facts.
4. At the end of the post, 8 or more persons are tagged and named.
5. Go to their page and leave them a comment telling them they're tagged. (or be lazy like I am) XD


1. I am left-handed, my daughter and only child is left-handed, and my husband (her step-father) is left-handed. What are the odds of that? And we all, of course, are exceedingly brilliant.

2. My wonderful daughter is a male-to-female transsexual. She is beautiful, brave, smart, and a second-generation activist with more courage than I can imagine. She and her partner are on their way right now to Colorado to meet with Dr. Marcie Bauer, the world's first surgeon doing gender reassignment surgery who is herself trans. You go girls! Love ya!

3. I have a bad case of Salieri Syndrome (anybody seen Amadeus?) I can recognize and appreciate greatness in others, but am constantly frustrated by my own inability to achieve it.

4. I am now two inches shorter than I was ten years ago when all my health problems started. I don't know if it's due to the deterioration in my spine or the surgical fusions they have done in my neck, but I find it very depressing. I liked being a 5'10" tall woman. I just have to somehow keep that height in my head.

5. I used to be a dog person, specifically a weiner-dog person. Then a little orphaned calico from the SPCA named Katerina took over our household and my heart. Now I am a dog AND cat person.

6. Although I don't do it as much as I used to, I love to cook, especially Greek Cooking. I make the best Baklava I have ever tasted. Seriously.

7. I was a 10-pound baby, the fat kid in my class, and have needed to lose around a hundred pounds most of my adult life. Ask me if I care?

8. The first time I ever sang and played my guitar solo in front of people was at an all-woman show in a gay and lesbian bar in 1976. I was scared shitless, not because it was a g/l bar, but because I am shy and was not confident of my singing. I was unaware that the custom was to put money in the pockets of the <"clothes"> of performers they approved of, and was unnerved when people came up and started putting money in the pockets of my overalls. (I hadn't been there on strip nights.)

9. Somewhere in Washington, DC there is a picture in a little folder of me in standing in front of our local shipyard gate protesting the commissioning of yet another nuclear sub with nuclear weapons aboard, circa 1980 - the year my kid was born. The FBI guy somehow thought we wouldn't see him in his unobtrusive bright blue leisure suit with his giant camera, systematically snapping pics of all of us. Does this make me a terrorist?

10. I still speak a little French, from my college days, and a little Lakota that I learned from my husband who speaks it fairly fluently. So toksa ake, folks. (Pronounced Doke-sha ah-kay, that's "See ya later.")

I don't know how to put the cute little graphics in my journal with your avvies, so all of you that get this because I friended you, CONSIDER YOURSELF TAGGED with this damn thing. I only have about ten friends anyway, so that works out about right.

Happy Birthday, John Lennon.

If not for the bullets from the handgun of one misguided and mentally ill young man back in 1980, John Lennon would have been 67 years old today. It's strange how when one dies young like that they are frozen forever in our memories at that age, perpetually youthful, and they never age. But today I can't help but think about the things that John Lennon was robbed of by that early death as well. I think of how he would have loved the Cirque du Soleil show, Love, now being done with the Beatles music; and how the widely-acclaimed recent movie movie Across the Universe has brought the Beatles music to a whole new generation of movie-goers and music lovers; and how his children Sean and Julian have grown and thrived since his death, and recently were even on tour together briefly, music apparently a forming bond between them in addition to shared heredity. I don't believe he has any grandchildren yet, but given what a devoted father he was and how much joy he got out of that facet of his life, I can only imagine how much he would have enjoyed watching his grandchildren grow up when he did have them.

After twenty-seven years I still miss John Lennon, his honesty, his integrity, and his humor, and I always will. Thankfully we will always have his music to remember him by.

Happy birthday, John. Strawberry fields forever,

I just checked the Adult Swim board because there was a new post - the blowhard backed down and caved in,and even acknowledged my idea to spread the word about Saiyuki to other comms! She totally backed down from my question about her ominous remark about AS going to "get into trouble" if they ran Gensomaden. She has acceded to my plan for world domination by Saiyuki fans, and given up her place in the power struggle! MWAHAHAHA! Saiyuki rules!! (*does happy gimp dance*)

Seriously though, we still need LOTS more voices on that thread to get the mods attention. It needs to get HOT. Please post info about it anywhere you can think of. I know everyone is busy - every night when I finally get around to trying to go to sleep, I realize there are about ten things I forgot to do, emails I still need to respond to, and don't even get me started on the story ideas waiting to be fleshed out. And because I am on disability and my daughter is grown, I have a lot more time on my hands than most of you with RL jobs, small children, college classes, and so on. I know how hectic it it for you all, and I am constantly impressed with how much you all do manage to get done.

I push this because it is important to me, because I sort of see it as a way to pay it forward. It is ten years this month since I first got the stabbing pain that first took me out of work one day from my library job of 17 years. Turned out I was never able to go back after that day, and seven surgeries and ten years later, it looks like I will never go back. I stay at home all the time, alone most of the day, and live with constant pain. As of last Fall I had pretty much adjusted as well as could be expected to all of that. I've always been independent since I was a small child, and I am basically an introvert, so being isolated and keeping my mind occupied was not that much of a problem. Having a wonderful daughter, a sweet husband, and two great pets helped tremendously.

Last Fall the dominoes started to go down. My daughter, who is 27, started to have panic attacks at work and admitted that she was in a deep clinical depression, something she and I both have wrestled with over the years. We got her in therapy and on meds right away. Three weeks into this our eighteen year old dachshund, who had been incredibly robust and sprightly up until then, suddenly failed dramatically and had to be put down. It hit me and my daughter extremely hard, and one year later we are only now able to talk about him without completely losing it. He was a great dog and a big part of our lives for so long. Only another pet lover can truly understand how traumatic it is to lose a beloved animal - to say they are part of the family is an understatement.

We staggered through November - I had a birthday, but didn't feel much like celebrating turning fifty, a milestone I had been dreading since I turned forty. Maybe it was because of all the other crummy things going on, but fifty hit me very hard, and I was not a happy camper .

Shakespeare says sorrows come not as single soldiers but in whole battalions, or something like that. The next invasion came hard upon, when my husband's mother, who we had theorized we would have to hit with a sledgehammer when she turned one hundred, she had always been so disgustingly healthy, got sick and died quite suddenly in early December. My relationship with her had always been somewhat problematic, but she was his mother, and it hit my husband quite hard. Then as if he needed more grief, she left her estate set up in such a way that it was the biggest possible slap in the face to him, her only child, that it could have been. The month as I look back is a blur of arrangements, anger, church people, lawyers, and driving. The only good thing about it was that my husband, who had been working two jobs for years, took time off from both to deal with it all and we spent more time together than we had in years, and actually got to know each other again.

January was the month for the Joys of Parenting. My daughter plummeted and admitted that was she suicidal, and had to be institutionalized. My husband's son, then 16, had been testing the patience of the juvenile justice system with his escapades since he was 13 and finally ended up in Juvenile Detention - about two years too late as far as I was concerned. At any rate for one hellish week there both of our children were in institutions. It was not something I care to repeat. But life does go on, Cami came home and fell promptly into a relationship that has proved to be her salvation, and has found her life partner. My stepson was not going to be allowed to move back in with his mother because if the instability of her situation, so he moved in with us, which was not the best thing for us for a number of reasons, but there was nothing else for it apparently.

This was when I finally crashed. My husband went back to work at not two but three jobs and was never home, my daughter was enthralled with her new love (which I was very happy she had found, but she no longer needed me after all the preceeding months of heavy angst), my home was invaded with this stepson who I had never been close with, my dog was dead, and I was fifty fucking years old. Spiffy. I fell headlong into a clinical depression that made all my prior experiences with depression look like a walk in the park. I could not sleep (I never sleep much or well anyway) and started having nightmares, lost all interest in eating and sex, became borderline agoraphobic, stopped answering the phone, and cried off and on much of the time. I tried to explain to my husband what I was going through but it was like trying to explain the color blue to a blind man. Of course I saw a therapist throughout it all and took my antidepressants like a good girl, but nothing seemed to help. She was perceptive and cut me no quarter when I tried to hide the depth of my problem. She concluded that one thing that was going, on in addition to a reaction to recent events - you mean there's more? - was that I was having post-traumatic stress disorder from events earlier in my life as well. Wonderful

From the beginning of this hideous stretch of events back in October there had been one constant. Cami is an anime buff, has been for years, and she doesn't have cable in her little apartment, so when she went out of work I started tivo'ing anime shows off of Adult Swim for her. She would come over and we would watch them together. Years prior when she was still living with us I had watched a few shows with her but had been largely unimpressed. I couldn't separate Japanimation in my head from the Astroboy of my youth (ironically the same one they are running now on AS) which I had loathed. So I was lukewarm about watching the anime, but did it to be with Cameron. Well, one show started to draw me in. Fullmetal Alchemist started to pique my curiosity and I started asking Cami questions. "Why is that armor empty?" and "What is that line thingie on their head when they get mad?" (the throbbing vein). More importantly I started to be drawn into this touching classic quest tale of this boy and his brother trying to do the right thing for each other, and their adventures on the road. I continued to watch FMA as long as they ran it, and was quite chagrined when they pulled if off of AS after episode 51, because I had not seen the full cycle. I went to the Adult Swim board online, tentatively because I had never been involved with an internet board before, and checked the place out.

I spent a few weeks there, getting used to how to get around, and having some exchanges with folks there on the threads about FMA and bringing it back. I was somewhat dismayed by the overall tone there, as flaming was rampant, and bad language, and poor grammar and spelling seemed to be the order of the day. But for all I knew that was standard operating procedure on these things. Some kind soul - and I wish I knew who it was so I could thank them - referred me to a board called fullmetal-alchemist.com, and what a difference! The people there were civilized, kind, intelligent, and talented. They welcomed me and answered my questions, helped me find other anime to watch, and steered me to the world of fanfiction. I owe them a great deal. Around the same time, I found Saiyuki Reload on Encore and started watching it. Then all the pieces started to slowly fall into place.

I know some people would think it sounds silly to say something along the lines of "anime changed my life." After all, they're just cartoons, right? Well, I don't think in my case it would be an exaggeration to say that FMA, Saiyuki, the anime and fanfic boards, and the people I have met on them are all responsible for pulling me out of the depression I was in earlier this year. Having the shows to watch, and the boards to check, and people to talk with gave something to look forward to, and a focus, which I sorely needed. But there was more to it than that - I could have found that in the daily crossword.

Saiyuki and FMA both represent quest tales of people persevering despite the tragedies they carry with them from their pasts. That theme resonated with me when I started watching them, on a subconscious level, and it still resonates with me today one year later. It is what drives me more than anything to write the fanfiction I am now writing. They do it in a way that is not overly-sentimental or treacly, but with humor, intelligence, and in Saiyuki's case a little bit of edginess. How many prime-time American shows can you think of that do that?

If I can help get any of the Saiyuki series get a run on Adult Swim here with my little campaign, then I will consider it a chance to pay forward a small portion of what the series, and its fanbase have done for me. People underestimate anime - some of it may be just magic schoolgirls and giant robots. But some of it is a whole lot more.

cross posted on my journal on LiveJournal

(Cross-posted from LiveJournal because it's important to me and I wanted to!)

There is a thread going currently on the Adult Swim board titled "Saiyuki Should Be Brought Back to the Adult Swim Line-up" - here is the link: [link]
This will at least get you to the list of the current threads, and the Saiyuki thread is the third or fourth one down under the pinned ones depending on how hot the thread is -- lets get it hot!!

Believe it or not, the mods there really do watch those boards to see what the activity is, what people are interested in seeing. Myself and many others lobbied the AS board pretty heavily to bring back Fullmetal Alchemist when they pulled it last Fall, and darned if it didn't get brought back a lot sooner than some of the blowhards over there on the board said it would.

I am just enough of an old hippie at heart to believe a small number of dedicated people acting in unison can affect real changes in society. If each of us that love the Sanzo-ikkou joined the AS board (it's easy and painless) and commented on the thread, AND put an entry like this in any communities in they are involved with that have Saiyuki lovers, and everybody that saw those did the same thing, and so on... well, you get the picture.

I have two reasons for this. One is that I have the sense that Saiyuki is at a critical point in its lifespan as an anime series. I can't remember the details, the Saiyuki-Media-experts can fill that in for me, but I know that one of the studios that produced either Genso or Reload has gone under, and my understanding is that interest in Saiyuki in Japan is flagging. I think for us to get a run of any of the three series on something as prominent as Adult Swim would be a big boost to the show's popularity, and might go a long way towards maybe even getting new anime episodes made someday. I know if nothing else it would certainly be a wonderful way to show Minekura-sama how much we still love her and need her and "The Boys."

The other reason is that there are a lot of terminal smart-asses and blowhards on the Adult Swim Board, and one of them is on that thread. I have been (politely, in as Hakkai-esqe a manner as I can summon) been doing battle with her to defend Saiyuki's honor, but I frankly would love to send a shot from the banishing gun through the 'net right about now. She has a firm conviction that Gensomaden is crap for a number of reasons, and that Reload and Gunlock would be the ONLY episodes worth showing at all. I would love a little help in standing down this opinionated fool. She has been dominating the thread and making it look like her opinion is gospel, when in truth, only one or two other AS boarders have weakly agreed with her. I need some help dealing with her just on General Principle do defend the Boys honer - the bitch is really start to piss me off.

Thank you, folks.