update from sparkleup
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<p>That last one we drove out to Orlando where one of his friends, Jill, her family the holders of a Disney pass, had procured a hotel room somewhere on the outskirts of Walt Disney World where we could have a small party — Andrew and I, her and her…was it her boyfriend? And Floe and Necco. A mostly quiet night of drinking and talking and more drinking. Andrew and I got drunk. Floe and Necco got drunk. Jill got drunk, and her boyfriend got truly wasted. He ran a bath, climbed in fully-clothed, and cried about how much he loved his friends. We sat on the rim of the tub, dangled our feet in the warm water, agreed earnestly.</p>
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<p>And I did too! I loved Andrew, of course. I still do, from however far away. We haven’t talked in years, but I would not be who I am without him. I love Floe — I’ve worked with him on dozens of illustrations over the years. I loved Necco, even if he also fills me with loathing now. I suppose I must have loved Jill and her boyfriend, too. That sort of sticky-sweet love is infectious in a vodka-tinged haze.</p>
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<p>After that, we went to some event. Another alcohol-fueled party. Another awkward night. Another drive back home and then the rest of our stay. It went less than stellar, and we broke up the day I returned home. It had been a long time coming, not least of which because, without telling me, he’d been dating Jill for months beforehand.</p>
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<p>Shortly after I started to realize just how ill-suited I was to music education, I went through a change of identity online. While before I had gone by the name ‘Ranna’, cribbed from Garth Nix’s excellent Old Kingdom series, I now began to go by the name Makyo, from a zen Buddhist term which bears a similar meaning. Something about just how focused many of the general teacher education classes were on things other than education filled me with a sense that I might not actually be in any way helping students, but simply standing in their way. I was makyō. I was satan.</p>
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<p>I, at one point, was overtaken by the need to tell my story through the frame of a conversation with an ally. I described them — or perhaps they described themselves; the boundary between framing device and reality blurs — as “an ally, not a friend.” Towards the end of the project, we had a ‘conversation’ wherein I attempt to describe their inverse. Their response: “Not your enemy, but your adversary.” \parencite[25]{ally-making-of}</p>
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<p>Shortly after I started to realize just how ill-suited I was to music education, I went through a change of identity online. While before I had gone by the name ‘Ranna’, cribbed from Garth Nix’s excellent Old Kingdom series, I now began to go by the name Makyo, from a Zen Buddhist term which bears a similar meaning. Something about just how focused many of the general teacher education classes were on things other than education filled me with a sense that I might not actually be in any way helping students, but simply standing in their way. I was makyō. I was satan.</p>
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<p>I, at one point, was overtaken by the need to tell my story through the frame of a conversation with an ally. I described them — or perhaps they described themselves; the boundary between framing device and reality blurs — as “an ally, not a friend.” Towards the end of the project, we had a ‘conversation’ wherein I attempted to describe their inverse. Their response: “Not your enemy, but your adversary.” \parencite[25]{ally-making-of}</p>
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<hr />
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<p>I know, for instance, that my conversations with my husband around transition were many and scattered. We would chat over dinner, or we would talk on that horrifyingly yellow couch that he’d inherited about the fact that I was feeling strange about all these different aspects of identity. But you know what I remember? I remember sitting on that couch and talking in well-formed sentences, in paragraphs and essays, about why it was that I felt like the body I had and the body I \emph{had} overlapped incompletely, or I remember sitting on one of the dining table chairs turned to face the living room in a skirt I had made for myself, explaining to him that I felt like a part of me died when Margaras did.</p>
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<p>These were almost certainly conversations. They were full of filled pauses and the backtracking failures of speech that come with just plain chatting, but that’s not what I remember. I remember discourses and speeches and prayers.</p>
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<hr />
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<ol>
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<li id="fn:background-remember">
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<p>The Book of Job remembers it through just the discourses. It remembers entire conversations, entire histories of friendship, through the lens of those two weeks Job spent in the cold firepit, covered with ashes and sores. It remembers them all through discourses and speeches and prayers.
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<p>The Book of Job remembers it through just the discourses. It remembers entire conversations, entire histories of friendship, through the lens of those two weeks Job spent in the cold fire pit, covered with ashes and sores. It remembers them all through discourses and speeches and prayers.
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Perhaps strangest of all, though, it remembers them disjoint and out of order.</p>
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<p>Edward L. Greenstein discusses the transpositions, interpositions, and interpolations that go into the book of Job. Take, for instance, Job’s first speech. ((end with vision such that Eliphaz can reference it, despite no one else mentioning that.)) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:background-remember" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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<p>Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation.<sup id="fnref:intro-approaches"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-approaches">1</a></sup> Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was.</p>
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<p>\parencite{intro-to-job}</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I’ve heard said that “forgiveness is releasing the hope for a better past,” \parencite{wakefield} but it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? That quote itself is more complicated than that:</p>
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<p>I’ve heard it said that “forgiveness is releasing the hope for a better past,” \parencite{wakefield} but it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? That quote itself is more complicated than that:</p>
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<div class="verse">There are ways around being the go-to person
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even for ourselves
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even when the answer is clear
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forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past</div>
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<p>Primed as we are to take text out of context, wrap our own needs around it, and pretend that it is in all ways applicable to all situations (for did I not already ramble about mistaking accidental, individual symbols for universal ones?),<sup id="fnref:intro-symbols"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-symbols">2</a></sup> it’s so easy to misremember that the better past we hope for is just some dream, some thing we cling to long after the us that lived that past has died.</p>
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<p>Who knows if I was the go-to person, the punching bag for my Elihu, the object of her simple angers? Who knows if they remember me? She cut contact, without telling me, without telling me why, and who knows if she even knows the reason?</p>
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<p>Who cares, other then me?</p>
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<p>Who cares, other than me?</p>
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<p>All stories are perforce interpolations within real events.</p>
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<p>The story of identity, the story of coming to terms with existing in some particular way, is as a much an interpolation into the whole of us as anything. I am trans, yes, but that is not the story; that is the identity. I am who I am specifically because I did what I did, I learned what I learned, I changed how I changed. No amount of academic language will change that, no overanalysis of this or that will make me be anything else.</p>
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<p>The story of identity, the story of coming to terms with existing in some particular way, is as much an interpolation into the whole of us as anything. I am trans, yes, but that is not the story; that is the identity. I am who I am specifically because I did what I did, I learned what I learned, I changed how I changed. No amount of academic language will change that, no overanalysis of this or that will make me be anything else.</p>
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<p>“If Matthew died on September 6th, 2012,” I asked myself some years ago, “Was Madison born then?”</p>
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<p>That date, September 6th, had nothing in particular to do with gender. The answer was no, after all. Madison was born some two intercalary<sup id="fnref:intro-intercalary"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-intercalary">5</a></sup> years later. Matthew’s death had nothing to do with gender — he died when his friend died, when Margaras hit that barricade at fifty miles an hour.</p>
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<p>Matthew died and then I don’t remember what happened. I suppose there was a few years of fumbling around, poking and prodding at various parts of his body in the hopes that something could be salvaged. The hair, maybe? Or the softness of skin? Perhaps he could simply be recycled into something new, the same lump of clay molded and remolded into something new until some fresher breath of life was breathed into it.</p>
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<p>If Matthew died in 2012 and Madison wasn’t born until a few years later,<sup id="fnref:intro-fractions"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-fractions">8</a></sup> if I don’t remember those in-between years, then I keep questioning whether or not I actually existed then. I suppose 2013 involved dealing with the tic, and I guess we moved in 2014, but both of those stand-out events feel as though they happened to someone else, someone not Madison.</p>
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<p>If Matthew died in 2012, why was I not born then?</p>
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<p>In reply to asking myself that, I say, “If Matthew died on September of that year, then he was sick long before. This was part of his long, slow death rattle.”</p>
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<p>In reply to asking myself that, I say, “If Matthew died in September of that year, then he was sick long before. This was part of his long, slow death rattle.”</p>
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<p>He’d been sick for months. He’d contracted something terminal, been infected with some terrible, memetic illness earlier that year. Words had been whispered, implications, innuendo, little hints in growing silence and distance. These drilled their way into him, teased out an immune response in the form of defensiveness, then left a husk behind.</p>
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<p>Some long winter followed. He had died and crumpled to the ground. He mouldered a while before decomposing into the soil. He lay dormant beneath the earth, waiting for a thaw. Madison began to grow<sup id="fnref:intro-grow"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-grow">11</a></sup> during that false spring that hits at the beginning of March, those two weeks of warm weather that convince you that winter must be over, it must have passed and it was time to air out the house, to wash your jackets and hang them up for the year. We always forget about the second winter, but false spring is enough for the buds to peek out.<sup id="fnref:intro-change"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-change">10</a></sup></p>
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<p>Stories are as bound to time as we are, and all we can do is steal back a bit of that memory through however many words. All we can do with these memories pinned in place is regard them from a second level of distance and make guesses. All I can do now is make guesses as to the meaning of however many conversations — those very real words lost to the whims of technology — that lead to the slow and not always but often painful death of who I was.</p>
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<p>There is also Elihu, but more on him later. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:intro-elihu" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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<li id="fn:intro-fractions">
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<p>Job’s life being torn to shreds means that his brief time here on Earth, the only time he has with nothing after it, is one that divides ones life into finite fractions, into a before, a during, and an after. Job is struck for, what, two weeks? We may only guess, as the Adversary’s second visit to the sons of God and the Lord. And yet those are two weeks out of a finite number of years.</p>
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<p>Job’s life being torn to shreds means that his brief time here on Earth, the only time he has with nothing after it, is one that divides one’s life into finite fractions, into a before, a during, and an after. Job is struck for, what, two weeks? We may only guess, as the Adversary’s second visit to the sons of God and the Lord. And yet those are two weeks out of a finite number of years.</p>
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<p>This centers God’s response as the sticking point. He spends four chapters responding to Job the conversations that have taken place between him and his friends. While these conversations make up the majority of the book, His response solely in the context of this framing device (which, we must remember, is an older folktale which has been re-cast as a framing device for the rest of the book) gives us a particular flavor of ‘God works in mysterious ways’ with more nuance than one commonly finds when that phrase is employed.</p>
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<p>God appears to Job and his friends and expounds on the fact that none of them do — nor indeed can — possibly understand the ways in which he works. They’re not just mysterious, they’re vast and incomprehensible. This makes the most sense in a panentheistic view. If He is outside time, then, from our point of view, those ways stretch both forwards and back. If they envelop and pervade all things tangible and intangible, then they are beyond even our causal domain.</p>
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<p>Even in a grounded, Jahwist, immediate and physical view of God<sup id="fnref:intro-exist"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:intro-exist">9</a></sup> (He is, after all, there in the form of a whirlwind), his entrance comes off as bizarre and unnerving. He passes through the physical plane as the Sphere does through the Square’s planar existence. Even in so physical a form, He proves His very incomprehensibility.</p>
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<li id="fn:intro-change">
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<p>Our Job, though, our poor, ruined man, has he changed? Has he grown into something new? Has he integrated who he was during those weeks or months of grief with who he was before that? Has he built for himself a new identity? Has he become braver? More fearful?</p>
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<p>There is a saying that, with near-death experiences, there are two likely outcomes. One is that you become a braver, more vivacious person. You live your life all the fuller because you got so close to not living at all. After all, if you have been given a second chance, why not?</p>
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<p>But still, there’s that second option: you become consumed by fear. You freeze up and do not leave the house. Any potential source of death is a thing to become avoided.</p>
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<p>But still, there’s that second option: you become consumed by fear. You freeze up and do not leave the house. Any potential source of death is a thing to be avoided.</p>
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<p>This is no value judgement. To be consumed by fear after having your own mortality stand up before you, sneer down its nose, and give you a playful shove bears no shame. It is an honest acceptance of who you are in the face of the enormity of the universe.</p>
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<p>And sure, it might be a spectrum, and there’s probably that absolute midpoint where there is no change. You make it through that brush with death and come out the other side precisely the same as you were before. There is terror in this prospect, that death might be so overwhelming that there is nothing you can do but wrap that experience up in butcher paper, tie it with twine, and set it up in the attic. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:intro-change" title="Jump back to footnote 10 in the text">↩</a></p>
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