a couple of short updates:

1) Regarding this post, decrying the rash of male entitlement i experienced in the duration of one short day....the first man I talked about, parasailing Peter, who signed the Freedom of Choice Act petition because he thought the girls asking him to sign were cute....he's a regular at the cup & top cafe, where i work. he's actually, every so often, a decent enough guy. my read of him, now that i know him a little better (he likes mochas, by the way, but sometimes just goes for a regular coffee), is this: he's a lonely guy. he probably thought that by giving me and my co-volunteers a compliment on our looks, he would be able to engage me in conversation for a while, and be a little less lonely. and it worked. and it still works, at the cafe. he's getting his needs met through a totally manipulative, entitled avenue, but he has good reasons for those needs, and for feeling he needs to use these manipulations to meet them. i didn't think it would happen, but i'm growing compassion for him. for this entitled white guy who chuckled when i said i thought women were still second-class citizens, who was pro-choice solely because he thought we pro-choicers were hot....i have compassion for him.

this approach to those we might deem our "enemies," or at least the people whose interests oppose ours, has potential.
that whole "catch more flies with honey than vinegar" thing, i guess.


2) Regarding this post, on authenticity and belonging and passing and community:
I noted that there was no place where I could be my whole self, where there wasn't some part of me I felt I needed to censor or de-emphasize.
That's not entirely true now. That community is small; currently made up of 3 or 4 people, but it exists. And I'm whole in it. Or, at least, working my way towards being wholly myself with these select people.
I still can't be wholly myself within a lot of the communities I was trying to be part of. Still do sometimes try to be a part of. I don't know that I ever will be, though I hold out some hope that maybe these communities I yearn to be a part of will one day accept all of us not-quite-enough people in our wholeness. But in creating my own community, one that's not exclusively survivors, or queer women (well, actually, they are all queer, but that's out of chance rather than intentional identity politics), or women of colour....in creating this community for myself, I've created / am creating that space that I crave so much. That space that I can be whole in, that space where I can have company in my wholeness.
How's that for an uplifting note to end on?