My sister the Ambassador For Life

August First was my grandmother's birthday. She would have been 84, but she died in 1995, of lung cancer. I buried her husband this past January. He also died of lung cancer. And its has been three years since one of my sisters got her initial diagnosis of -- yep, lung cancer. She's been through surgery, radiation, chemo and remission, followed by systemic metastasis that resulted in a terminal "you've got weeks to live" diagnosis.

But she's still here. Been through another round of full round of chemo, just had a chest X-ray. There is a shadow. If her cancer is on the grow again, well, that's it. She's had the maximum dosage of radiation and chemo. Her bones are so brittle she's broken a half dozen ribs since the first of the year. Her digestive system can't tolerate meat or glutens anymore. But she keeps going. She lives every day like tomorrow doesn't matter. Does 500 push ups and 1000 crunches every day. She's one of my heroes. She's been named one of the American Cancer Society's "Relay for Life" ambassadors, and will be speaking at a fundraiser this month.

She's also unemployable and uninsured except for MediCal. If she'd had insurance, her lung cancer probably would have been caught long before it reached Stage IV. So in a lot of ways, she's not only an ambassador for the American Cancer Society, she's also a poster-child for the need for affordable and preventive health care.

I thought this country had grown up a bit, outgrown the fear-mongering and stepped up to hope and work for the future. And the way some Americans are acting these days, well, it shames us all. It is reprehensible to play on people's fears. It is shameful to lie to them. But even worse is the pervasive laziness and ignorance. Americans are complacent. We've become cattle at the trough, internalizing whatever the media sends through, no matter how outrageous.

This is democracy and freedom of information at work. And we think the rest of the world should emulate us?! Americans have become so lazy, so bloated with information, that they do not consider what they consume. All critical thinking skills seem to have been drowned in high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated vegetable oil, not to mention pundits and talk show hosts.

I know this is very un-sexy. I know you probably read my blog looking for an escape from reality to sensuality. And I try to stick to my motto of giving voice to the sensual immediacy of life, I really do, only sometimes, sometimes the words stick in my throat and I think of the poet Shane Koyczan saying that he doesn't keep change in his pocket he keeps it in the tip of his pen, because sometimes the writing on the wall can use a little revision.

And I think about my sister, who is dying by the millimeter, cancer cell by cancer cell, and how she still finds the energy to be an Ambassador For Life, and if a woman for whom every breath is a painful reminder of 80 year old ribs in a 40 year old body has the willpower to run a Relay for Life what the FUCK am I doing writing about frottage and orgasms and soft sheets? Does writing about the sensual immediacy of life come close to the level of advocacy she and every person on this planet needs when it comes to health care?

Come on people, let go of your fears. I know you are afraid, we all are. But the difference between the man who killed Martin Luther King and the man who walked on the moon is the man who walked on the moon put his fears of the vaccum of space aside, and took that giant leap for mankind. And the difference between the mobs at the townhall meetings and the thousands who run in the Relay For Life is a recognition that ignorance and fear kill far more people than cancer does. Big Business interests are buying your fears. Your pharmacy purchases, your medical premiums -- your money is going toward the millions of dollars a day being spent on misinformation campaigns that are producing the desired result of paralyzing people with fear so the bottom-line keeps growing at double-digit rates.

Don't let the dying put us to shame. You, too, can be an ambassador for life. Go look for the facts instead of swallowing the inflammatory swill the media outlets are calling "news" and speak the truth to the ignorant. Or one day you, too, just might find yourself with insufficient health insurance and a powerful need for health care, looking back and thinking "if only that insurance reform had gone through back in '09. Then maybe a routine pap smear would have caught my cancer and I could have seen my daughter graduate from high school."

End of rant.

Fearing women

It is my assessment that men fear women. They fear women because they do not understand us. Feminine logic escapes them and so they cannot predict us. They fear us because no matter how often they join their bodies with ours, seeking to know and be known -- no matter how often they experience the shuddering release of their essence into our bodies -- they know, even in that moment of ultimate sharing -- of orgasmic bliss-- they know they've never really penetrated the mystery of our otherness. And never will. And for the male of our species, the systematizers, the catalogers, the knowledge-seekers -- what cannot be dismantled, discovered, or known is feared. Sure, there are other emotions mixed in there -- respect, for some, and for others, dread, and a need to conquer or destroy -- but for the most part, consciously or not, most male interaction with the feminine is characterized by fear.

I usually manage to over-ride the feelings of exasperation, irritation, indulgence, and superiority with which most women greet the male fear-response to our impenetrable otherness. Usually. Occasionally, though, I cannot help it.

For all that I am very female, I have a rather masculine mind. I am highly intuitive, but I am also very logical. The combination of the two can be very formidable. I have excellent reasoning / critical thinking skills and am in the top 1 percentile for intelligence. Science, math, economics, programming, trouble-shooting / complex problem-solving -- these come easier to me than to most women. And quite a lot of men. I've been called a polymath by people I respect, though I think of myself as a dilettante. Its not that I'm lacking a polymath's abilities. I'm just lacking the ambition. Winning stopped mattering to me when I realized that other people felt hurt by losing. A rather feminine characteristic.

So, because I am a warm, loving, non-competitive woman, some men underestimate me. They fear me for what I consider the wrong reasons. And this peeves me. And not just me. It peeves quite a few of my peers, women who are feared because they are female but also unrespected because they are female. Because we know that women are capable of terrible things. It just so happens that we rarely tap into the place where that capacity lies dormant because it takes special circumstances to awaken it. For millennia women have made the terrible choice of life or death -- history is full of stories about children exposed to the elements for coming at the wrong time, for example. We've gone to war and when we fight, there are no rules and there is no mercy -- just blood and gore (Go Boudicca). We've pitted man against man, country against country. We've brought down empires as matters of personal vendettas, to right wrongs perpetuated against ourselves, or more often, against those we love.

But men think that women's history of needing to manipulate them to achieve our ends still stands today. They seem to think we cannot fight our own battles and thus they disregard us as martial threats. They forget that we can do battle on the field of the intellect, and that this new Information Age is a great equalizer -- superior physical strength does not matter here. We, too, can fight wars with keystrokes.

Something happened recently in which someone I care for was wrongly accused of something, to the point that evidence was manifactured, and that falsified proof used as a reason to act against him -- and incidentally me. It is nothing illegal, merely a matter of inter-personal politics (ie grudge), but I am enraged nonetheless. The one who accused him has spread fear and paranoia that he will exact revenge.

The irony is that they fear the wrong person. What lies dormant in this woman is awakened when those I care for are threatened. I have the skillset and connections to make Cooper's life in his little world hell should I wish it. If he is not careful, I just might choose to live my life in such a way that when my feet hit the floor in the morning, both he and Satan shudder and say 'Oh shit....she's awake!'

I am woman. Fear me, oh man. Fear me now while I'm still rumbling. Because you do not want to hear me roar.