dis/information

I suppose the more information you have the more power you have, but at points I feel like the more I know the weaker I feel. This isn’t something I remember learning about when we talked about information gathering and health informatics in library school, though admitedly these were not areas I pursued. I don’t remember anything about people trying to avoid getting more information about themselves; only about alternative routes toward more of it. It might be what they call “information overload”, but I’ve always sworn up and down that I don’t believe in that. It’s not quite that.

It’s as if I have constructed this very careful house of cards, where each card is a piece of information I would like to believe about myself and my own body. I suppose we all have one, more or less; we accept some failings of our bodies, and rely on other non-failings as part of our self-image. We couldn’t walk if we didn’t believe our feet would hold our weight, of that our joints would cease to swing in mid-motion. Each time a health professional comes at me with something that pulls out one of my supports in this house of cards, my careful construction collapses on one side. But I regroup, I rationalize, I see the bright side. He didn’t really mean that, or that’s just a worse case scenario. She doesn’t really know, or she’s just blinded by her specialty and sees what she wants to see. And people help me in my disinformation reconstruction too: It’s the money, they want to see it this way so that they can get more money from your case, or doctors always overreact in fear of getting sued. So then this phantom card sets up where the old one was. The phantom card that I need so desperately to be real. (It might be real, who knows?) And my house of cards stays up, as long as I don’t think about it too much.

So I luxuriate in my disinformation, or my not-quite-what-she-said information, my hopeful information. Google is a wonderful thing; it can go either way, support what anyone, everyone says.

And then I go back to see the people with the charts and the certainties, and they take another swipe at my house of cards. You’d think the farther along you get the less likely these little offhand comments (things like make her an urgent appointment with the surgeon and you’re lucky, this is one of the curable ones or if you have to pick, this is the one to choose!) completely destroy me. I want to be surrounded by my disinformation. Is that so much to ask? I’m not fighting the recommendations, I’m being a good girl and I’m following all the instructions to the letter. I suppose there’s only so far you can go down that path, pretending to humour your doctors. It’s hard to be that pompous. What do I know? There comes a point where you have to believe them. They’re the experts. They sound ever so certain about what it is, and they’re so reassuring about how everything will be okay.

My surgeon says: You’re going to die of old age.

He points out the part of me with the alien cells in it, the little terrorists, and from that point on I can feel it all the time. A constant, dull ache in my throat. Lying in wait. I’d tear it out with my own hands if I could.

But I still suspect that they’re wrong about it. Or, I suspect they’re wrong a great deal of the time, and a portion of the time I feel the utter terror in the belief that they are entirely right. But they have no real proof. Only an educated hunch. Hunches are wrong all the time. In a matter of days they will slice me open, take it out, and know for sure. And then we’ll see who gets the last laugh.

And I failed typing in high school

94 words

Touch Typing

The Quiet Wedding

As reported elsewhere, I’ve gotten engaged.

I’m sitting on what is, I suppose, a kind of personal conflict. Marriage is a traditional heteronormative lifepath, and the non-traditional, non-heteronormative parts of me tend to bristle at the thought of it. First, there’s the historical issues. Women being handed over from father to husband like cattle; the white dress and the presumption and requirement of sexual “purity”; the changing of names, effacing a woman’s identity, etc. And then there are the modern reinterpretations of marriage which I find additionally troublesome. The price of entering the wedding dress cult; the fantasy weddings girls are meant to dream about from the time they can first fathom the concept; bridesmaids; the “princess for a day” mentality; the endless expensive gifts from near-strangers; and of course all that money, time and energy poured down the drain for a single celebratory day that doesn’t appear to denote much more than the signing of some paperwork and a photo op.

You could call me cynical.

On the other hand, I can appreciate the value of two (or more) people commiting to each other for the long term. That’s a wonderful thing. Life is short, often uncomfortable, and requires a lot of laughter, alcohol, and international travel to keep it from getting horribly boring. Having a partner in crime can help you along the way. It’s good to love other people. And awfully nice if they love you back.

I suppose my issues with marriage aren’t really about the practicalities of the thing itself, but more about the ceremony and its trappings. I don’t object to monogamy (I vastly prefer it). I don’t object to sharing resources, taking turns putting the cat out, or washing the dishes leftover from someone else’s amazing dinner experiments. I don’t object to the joining of families or making compromises. It’s the wedding machine that throws me off. In the end I think it comes down to a basic philosophical premise about what the committment is about, what that ceremony is, and who’s responsible for the relationship.

A grand wedding, it seems to me, is an attempt to make an entire community complicit in the relationship. You stand up before these people, you let them know, we are committed to each other; please help us keep that committment. Please treat us differently, respect our committments, keep us from turning astray. Friends and family are all part of your relationhip, the den mother that looks in and makes sure all is well, makes sure that everyone in the community is behaving accordingly. This is never more obvious as when a married man or woman has an affair; some will pin blame on him/her, while others will point fingers the co-conspirator, wondering why s/he failed to keep the public compact that has been made between the couple and the community: this person is off-limits to you, and you must respect that. I’ve always been conflicted about this expectation (though I have not ever taken up with anyone in a committed situation, let it be known!). The people in a relationship define their expectations of each other, and it’s not up to them to dictate behaviour of others. If a married person decides to break vows, that is the married person’s decision. (I wouldn’t want to be the person s/he is breaking said vows with, however; how fraught! How dramatic! How ultimately pointless!) I suppose in this arena I am a strange individualist. I love the idea of individuals being built from the whole of the community in which s/he resides, but when it comes to romance, that seems to be an ultimately private affair to me.

This is an odd sort of private experience, between the two of us, where we will whisper our commitment to each other once again and sign the legal papers that solemnify the promise. No one else needs to hold us to it, no one else needs to ensure that we succeed. We cannot expect someone else to make our committments a reality, and this is where we’ve thrown in our lot with each other rather than with the whole world. It’s a quiet moment where we say, yes, I really do mean it, we’re in this for the long haul. It’s a whisper rather than a brass band concert; we say it softly rather than shouting it from the rooftops because we’re both just here, and sound only needs to travel as far as each other’s ears. It’s not a secret, as I am wearing a ring on my finger, thanks to Jeremy’s mother. It’s not a secret, but it’s not a responsibility, either. And I’m not wearing it to remind others that I am taken. I’m wearing it to remind myself that he is always close by (even when he is far away).

So I am embarking on the heteronormative lifepath entirely by accident. It was never my intention, but as it turns out, there’s this fellow who causes me long-term delight, and I thought it would be best to stick with him.