Tag: SFPride

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are we there yet?

June is Pride month. This will be my third year not participating in SF Pride, the first two because of the pandemic, and this year because I wasn’t invited back…and moved out of the bay area. There’s a part of me that misses it, but the agoraphobe in me does not.

I once thought we were making so much progress in the area of equal rights, but the last few years have proven me wrong. We’re sliding inexorably backward. Our rights are under constant attack. Our young people feel threatened. Hate crime continues to be a problem, and in some areas, it is a worsening problem.

People are still being killed just because of what is or is not in their pants or how they dress/present themselves to the world.

People ask why we still need Pride.

Well, we need Pride for the 8-year-old who knows she’s a girl but was born with a penis whose parents will not acknowledge her gender. We need pride for the gay teenager who really wants to take his boyfriend to prom but is afraid they will get beaten up. We need Pride for the shy lesbian teens on their first date who are afraid to hold hands. We need Pride for the teacher who won’t put a picture on her desk of her family, because she might lose her job if people knew that her spouse was a wife and not a husband.

Have we come a long way since the fifties? Sure, but our progress has not just stalled, it has started to slide backward in a lot of ways and there is still such a long, long way to go.

We are not done. The fight is not over. Stay strong, my friends, and battle on.

Happy Monday, and Happy Pride, Readers. May this week bring you a multitude of blessings.

Photo by Jiroe (Matia Rengel) on Unsplash

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do we still need pride in 2021

In any “normal” year, I would already be hard at work on the site of the SF Pride celebration, working with my team to deploy donation buckets out to the groups that man our gates to collect money from Pride goers.

That money goes into helping to keep Pride running, as well as giving grants to the non-profit organizations who send us their volunteers to do the job. It’s a job I’ve been doing in one capacity or another for the last…I don’t know anymore? Fifteen years?

You might think that it’s an odd job choice for someone with agoraphobia, and you’d be correct. It is. However, I learned early on in my battle against the irrational fear that having a job to do, having people who count on me to do that job, goes a long way in pushing the fear back.

When I first started working Pride with the Pagan Alliance all those years ago, I started off volunteering to supervise PA volunteers, but the Pride Donations department was just starting up a program to have coordinators who worked behind the scenes and I tossed my hat into the ring. Since then, I’ve been part of the team that did the work.

It provides me with a safe space when the crowds are overwhelming, and a task that needs doing to allow me the push I need to conquer the fear…or at least keep it at bay. It helps that it also includes a golf cart for part of the day, which affords me a little bubble of space around me.

All of that said, this is our second year without the event due to this damn pandemic. It just isn’t safe to cram that many people into that space, even now…even here in California where our numbers are way down.

I’ve heard a lot lately about why we still need Pride. We need Pride so that our community knows that we have their back. We need Pride because our transgender siblings are still being murdered at an alarming rate. We need Pride because our people are still facing discrimination in jobs, housing and even just in shopping. We need Pride because we need to lift each other up and help each other along.

In recent years we’ve started to realize just how many LGBTQA+ folks exist in this world, and it’s a lot more than we used to believe. I have a large number of non-binary and ace friends and family that ten years ago would not have felt safe to be who they are in the open…or even realized that there was a name for what they were feeling. I have transgender friends and family that have “come out” in the last five years, who are finally starting to feel that there is a place in this world where they don’t have to pretend.

So when will it be enough to not need a big gay celebration and parade? Never. It will never be “enough”. We should always celebrate who we are.

May this Pride weekend be filled with love and appreciation for who you are, Reader. May you feel safe to live your truth out and proud. May you make space for others to do the same. I love you all!

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

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it’s the end of the world as we know it

Any normal June 1st would see me waist deep in preparation for San Francisco’s Pride Festival and Parade, which usually happens near the end of June. I’d be planning training sessions for my volunteer groups and their supervisors. I’d be fielding phone calls from first time volunteers over the phone, holding skype calls to help someone get up to speed. I’d be pouring over spreadsheets, making sure each entry gate had enough people manning the donation buckets.

This year, in a time of a pandemic, we had already canceled the parade and festival before the current escalation of the end of the world, but I can only imagine that if we hadn’t, we’d be seriously considering it now.

Why? Well, because drunk, stupid people are hard enough to contain when they don’t have an instigator driving them to bad behavior. Because we’ve seen so many clashes of community and police (though I have never personally seen police acting inappropriately at the festival itself, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen) and because right now emotions are very high and the world seems to be standing at the tipping edge of something huge.

SF Pride sometimes has 1 million people over the course of the weekend. Those people come in every ethnicity, every nationality, every color, every orientation and every gender. Outside the gates there are protesters trying to tell us our “lifestyle” is wrong, or sometimes other messages that often get lost in the clamor of that many people. There are criminals looking to score drugs or to bloody someone for fun. There have been shootings and stabbings. There have been gay bashings.

Lay that on top of the racial tensions and the fear and the anger, and you’d have a recipe for one giant powder keg, just waiting for a spark to set it alight.

So here I sit at the beginning of Pride month, a little numb and staring into the heart of a country that no longer feels like home, and I hide in my house, watching the chaos around me unfold. My agoraphobia makes it nearly impossible to join a peaceful protest. We will see a spike in virus numbers. This might devolve into a civil war, or at least that’s the way it feels.

Maybe it is the end of the world as we know it. I’m not convinced that is a bad thing. It’s up to us, every individual to decide how we rise from the ashes.

Please stay safe out there, Readers. Support your brothers and sisters as they cry out in rage for change, for equality, for an end to the violence of poverty, discrimination and straight out hate.

None of us are equal until we are all equal.

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the games people play

Wow, how did we get to March so fast?!  Seems like we were only just sludging our way through the year of January, and now we’ve made a slide into March.  My plans to take over the world have fallen seriously behind.  Something must be done!

No, seriously, while things are ugly in the world of politics and the scare of a global pandemic is emptying shelves in the stores around the country, and the fact that I still do not have gainful employment, I’m doing pretty good.  At least through April, because I have my rent paid that far ahead.  So, I better find something pretty fast.

Honestly, I’d be surprised if some of the sluggishness in hiring is the uncertainty of the world right now.  I’ve seen the same technical writer jobs with the same companies posted and reposted on all the job boards since early in January.  At least one of them every few weeks since last summer, YIKES.

Add to that the fact that I refuse, at fifty one years old, to spend four hours of my day (on a good day) in the car to get to and from a job, and I’m left here trying to manifest a job that has yet to come into sight.  It is out there though.  I’m sure of it.

In the meantime, I write, I rummage and ransack job boards, I keep lists of places and jobs I have applied to, and I have rediscovered my love for story based video games.  I suck at them (as an example, I spent almost two hours yesterday trying to defeat the first serious “boss” in Jedi: Fallen Order…and gave up for the day without doing it…got her down to about half health a couple of times, but I’m not coordinated enough to dodge and stuff, and she’s wicked fast).

I am considering developing an online course for writers struggling with the concepts of Point of View and maybe a few others like it, but I have no concept of what to charge for something like that.  I’ve been coaching and beta-reading for years, but always in areas I can’t claim on a resume, so I’m thinking maybe I could formalize what I’ve been doing.  I’m also going to revamp my editing offerings, make them simpler.

Plus, it’s time for Pride to ramp up.  Had my first management meeting yesterday.  Got some exciting new ideas flowing there.  I hope it pays off.

For now, the coffee is hot and I need to start my daily haunting of Linked In and Glassdoor and Indeed…I’ve stopped using Monster (because holy hell the crap recruiters try to shovel in my direction from there) and even Career Builder (for much the same reason) which used to be my go-to sites for job hunting.

Happy Wednesday, Readers.  May kindness find you!

 

Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash

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and so it is…

Pride week. Second week on the new job.  Deadlines for writing and editing.

Yeah, it’s been a week.  And it’s only Wednesday!

I turned over my writing and editing stuff to all the various people who I needed to get it to early this morning, seeing as I was awake at 5 am, even though I’m pretty sure I meant to sleep a few more hours.  Might as well make use of the time, am I right?

I have to work the day job for a few hours this morning (it’s amazing how quickly you can burn through an allotted 20 hours!!), before turning my attention to the rest of my Pride prep, which at this point of the week includes doing laundry, sorting out my meds for the weekend, making sure the laptop is set up for sign ins over the weekend and making some hard boiled eggs.  Because Protein.

There is probably going to be some house cleaning and sorting through the piles of clothing I’ve pulled out of places to decide whether it stays or goes…and if it goes, where is it going to?  Having lost 122 pounds since my heaviest weight is great, but it does make clothing occasionally problematic.  I picked up two pairs of size 18W capri pants the other day…they’re already a bit baggy, and yesterday I put on a pair of size 16W that were too tight for comfort, but I could zip them up and everything.  Won’t be too long before I’m in those.  But that means the piles of 20Ws need to find new homes.

I should probably get on with the day job work.  More deadlines, you know?  And that cup of coffee I set down somewhere and is probably getting cold…I should go find that too.  Happy Wednesday, Readers!  And Happy Pride!

 

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

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disappearing act, work and pride

Oops!  I seem to have missed a couple of posts there last week!  Sorry about that.  Truth is, job hunting and Pride have eaten up all of my time lately.  The good news is that I’ve landed a job that is paying me well, and not taking up all my time, and once I’ve gotten my feet good and wet will let me work from home as much as I need to.

And how are we almost to SF Pride?  We’re under two weeks away!  I’m giving my first Supervisor’s training this Thursday!  It’s crazy!  I still have a little bit of work to do to be ready for that, so I anticipate this afternoon after work I will be deep into that.  It’s not like I haven’t given at least part of this training for more than 10 years!  I could probably do it in my sleep, but I still get anxious about getting ready.

As writing goes, I’m still kind of in limbo land, in part due to stress related writer’s block and in part due to editing commitments. Doesn’t keep my head from filling with ideas though…and I’m contemplating an anthology of short stories to get the juices flowing again…after Pride and the editing of the anthology for Sirens.

For now, I should get back to my coffee and my getting ready for work.  Happy Tuesday, Readers!

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so many irons in the fire

This time of year is my busy season.  Being out of work hasn’t eased any of it, in fact, in a lot of ways it’s made it harder, busier.  Looking for work is a full time job, as they say.  Add in the work I do for SF Pride, and some freelance editing, not to mention my own writing and you get one busy little author!

I have an interview today for a job I’d really like to get at a company in San Francisco that is working to change the landscape of finance for those who are un-banked or under-banked.  It’s a wonderful combination of work that I love and a cause I can get behind.

Yesterday, I spent most of my day working on Pride stuff…paperwork that all needs updating to 2019, contracts and acceptance letters…all kinds of fun stuff, then I cut out about two hours of my afternoon to read, an indulgence to be sure.

I recently won a leather bound edition of The Song of Ice and Fire, and have paused in my Sirens reading to start reading these.  I’m not quite two thirds of the way through the first book.  I’m interested to find how the books differ from the TV show.

I’m up early this morning, and hope to work on a short story that I’m writing before I have to start getting ready for the interview.  It’s a sci-fi piece about a girl who accidentally becomes an assassin, first out of necessity, but then discovering that she is good at it.

Right then, I should get to those words, and my coffee while it’s still hot.

 

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

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#amwriting Saturday

I am working on a short story this morning, a foray into the world of horror.  The story itself has been floating around in my head for years, and I figured it was time to bring it into being.

It’s another rainy Saturday here in California, and I’m still down with the cold that attacked me last week.   I’m feeling better, but as usual, the cough lingers and is slowly stripping me of my voice.

It’s hard to believe it’s March, and with the coming of March comes the time of year where my time is increasingly filled up with Pride duties.  Add in an anthology to edit and other fun and my days become filled with stuff to do.

At least it keeps me out of trouble, more or less.  Plus the day job has a lot going on this month too.  When it rains it pours.

That’s all I’ve got this morning, though Readers.  Time to get some coffee going and some words flowing.

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happy June

I know it’s cliche to say something about how fast the year is moving, but seriously, how is it June?  Granted I lost a few weeks there with dealing with my step-father’s death and the chaos that surrounds an unexpected end, but still!

For me, June is a crazy busy month.  The kind that makes agoraphobics like me more than a little anxious.  This is my only quiet weekend, and I hope to get some writing done, but I also have a bunch of stuff to finish for my first Pride training next weekend, and final orders for equipment to finish.

Yesterday as I was digging through some files on my cloud drive, files with such descriptive names as “story” and “story 2,” I came across a story I’d forgotten I’d started.  It’s a fantasy and I love the characters in it.  I may have to go back to work on that!

Anyway, here it is Saturday, and I have a house to clean, groceries to buy, Pride work to do, etc.  How about you? What’s your Saturday looking like, Readers?

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busy time of year

This is my busy time of year.  I have a full time job, of course.  I am working on writing one book, editing another and have several editing jobs on the horizon.  And, I work as the Community Partners Donations Team Manager for the San Francisco Pride festival.  Pride is just about two months away, and the donations team is just getting into full swing.

There are lots of small tasks I need to deal with and prepping of training materials, etc.  It’s a lot of work, but I do enjoy it.

I do, however, get a little frazzled sometimes.  When I get over tired, or have a night like last night where sleep was erratic, I can get grumpy.  What really makes me cranky though is when my writing time gets stolen by other tasks.  This week both of my jobs have done so.

I aim to try to keep up with posts here, on Facebook and on my Patreon page, but please forgive me if I miss a day.  My goal is to post here at least on Saturday and Wednesday, and on my Patreon at least Sunday and Wednesday.  I haven’t quite hit that, but I’ll get there.

In the meantime, here are some links to places you can find me.  I do hope you’ll stop by and say hi!

Facebook

Twitter

Patreon