Saturday, May. 28, 2022 - 10:52 am.
I find myself not having a lot to talk about here right now. Maybe if I used this diary to talk about world events, it'd be filled with tellings of horrible happenings and the emotions they arise in me. I actually don't discuss these events much, not even in my social media accounts. I care, deeply, but other people make better statements about what's going and I mostly just echo theirs.
But I do have a concern right now. Pride month is coming up and I'm setting up the streaming of a class I'm teaching on -long story short- rainbow capitalism. Last night, a friend of Andrew and I came over to hang out and she was telling us that another colleague at the Psych Department (wom Andrew and I also know) had taught a class on abortion activism on zoom and trolls hijacked it.
I haven't gotten any heat over my research on sexual and gender identities, but also I haven't received any attention. The latter, as we have well established in this diary, is both my curse and my blessing in life. One of my online questionnaires got two or three nasty sets of responses, somewhat silly and borderline offensive, but that appeared to be one person responding multiple times from a pool of 800 participants. So it hasn't been bad.
The zoom hijack, however, concerned me a bit. My class has a private link and the "public part" will be streamed on YouTube, and hopefully I can get rid of any horrible comments that might show up. I start to cower when I think of the possibility of trolls, but then I think I'm the head of a lab and I have to stand up for my students, specially the queer ones, and for anyone else who might find this useful.
Anyway. Besides that possibility, I really, really enjoy my work.
On another front, I didn't mention here last week that Helen's aunt passed away. She'd been on palliative care in a hospital due to cancer, with nothing else to do but to wait. This aunt was like a second mother to Helen and her sisters, and, just like their mom, she passed away from cancer after enduring a lot of pain for a while (and a bit after Mother's Day), so it's all the more heartbreaking.
Helen and her sisters flew to our home country. They had to fly their aunt's body from the US. The wake is today, the funeral is tomorrow. I sent flowers to Helen and her sisters to their house, and apparently that was a bigger gesture than I thought, in a good way. They have a big family and they're all unbereably religious and horrible, so I wanted to provide a bit of comfort.
I also told Helen I'm travelling to our home country in July. She asked me if I wanted us to meet up, and I said it'd be nice. She bought her ticket the day after, and I'm gonna be smug for a second and say look how I have her eating from the palm of my hand.
And that's it, I guess. Therapy's going well, Andrew and I are doing great, individually and together. Work's all right. My family's doing OK. Brother #2 sent us a picture of my nephew on his last day of middle school, proudly telling us he's now on his way to high school, and I remembered this week's shooting in the US a day earlier and I got a knot in my throat. I felt pain and fear, and I prayed for the safety of my nephew and her sister attending elementary school, and the rest of my family living in the US. This on top of hoping for the safety of my family living in my home country, which is an actual hell hole. Jesus Christ.
OK, yeah, now that's it. I shall retreat to my happy place, my comics.