Monthly Archives: October 2010

I love autumn, though here in the deep South, we don’t so much get a true four seasons as 9 months of Extreme Hot and 3 of Slightly Cooler.

Autumn is when the clothes lines tend to start offering clothing that I actually like, as opposed to things I wear because I have to have something to wear.   I can get away with dressing almost steampunk-like on an everyday basis. My favorite produce tends to start coming into season in the fall, giving me lots of awesome cooking ideas.

But most of all….Autumn gives me Halloween.

I’m not a huge fan of many of the other holidays. Most of the time they seem more bother than they’re worth, but I have always loved Halloween. Why not? It centers around two of my favorite things: Chocolate and Costumes.

And while Halloween has been grossly commercialized, just like Christmas, it really doesn’t take a lot of money for some really good decorations, and often the decorations you make cheaply can be better than anything you could ever buy.

Example of specimen jars from I Make Projects

I am lucky enough to have a huge collection of jars and bottles in my garage, thanks to a family that is fond of canning and wine-making, and last year I made some wonderful specimen jars like these made by the folks at I Make Projects.  I plan to make some more for my collection this year.

All you need is some jars/bottles with watertight lids, stick-on labels, some cheap & creepy-looking items from an everything’s-a-dollar store (Last year I used a small plastic naked baby doll, a rubber snake, plastic bugs, some citrus peels and onion skin (looks like skin/bits of flesh), some whole dried herbs and spices, etc.)

I used my grandpa’s typewriter to type the labels so they’d look old instead of printing them on the computer, though you could use a typewriter-look font, and on some of them I practiced my calligraphy skills. To make the labels look old weathered and stained, you can (briefly) dip them in or dribble tea or coffee on them. Just be careful not to get them so wet that the adhesive won’t stick, if you’re using self-stick labels, and remember that ink will run if you use an ink-jet printer or a non-permanent pen.  The labels are important, try to make them sound scientific in nature – experiments gone bad!

You can use food coloring to color the water, but I found that it usually makes it too happy-bright. The best things I found for coloring the water were tea, coffee grounds (in both cases, used – recycling!), cola, and mountain dew (or any sickly yellow-green looking drink). Make sure to add some alcohol to the water if you want to keep them around for multiple years, to keep mold/algae/etc. from growing in them, especially if you use the sugary drinks as a coloring agent. You don’t want any real specimens growing in your jars!

I think that this year, my project will be to mold a zombie head/arms digging its way out of my flower bed. I’ve wanted a garden zombie for a while.  I’ll try to get some good photos of it in-progress and finished.

Related articles

• I luv Halloween schtuff (jenx67.com)
• Easy Ways to Decorate for Autumn (gomestic.com)

I’m a bit busy today, but I did want to drop a line in support of the GLBT community and those who are choosing today to come out.

Because, you see, today is National Coming Out Day, and the more of us who can stand up and be themselves and be proud, the better for all of us. The more straight people who are willing to stand by their gay friends and support them, the better. The more people willing to say they aren’t going to let the world deny people their fundamental rights, drive people to suicide or kill them, destroy lives for no other reason than that those lives are a little bit different from their own, the better this world will be.

All it takes for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing.  It’s time to stop doing nothing.

Today I stand loud and proud. Today I wear my ribbons. Today I am who I am, for all the world to see. Not to show off, not to make people uncomfortable, but to show my support for those who can’t.  For those people who would get fired if they came out, for those who would be disowned, for those who would have to fear violence against their person for no crime other than admitting who they are. Because if we allow ourselves to become invisible, those who cause harm, who oppress and demean and destroy, are given free reign to spread their hate without consequence.

I don’t celebrate Coming Out day for me. I celebrate it for them . . . because the more of us who can, and are willing to stand up between those who cannot yet stand  and the oncoming tide of  bigotry and hate, the safer it will be for all of us, whether GLBT or straight, to be ourselves.

Related articles

• Happy National Coming Out Day, To One And All (towleroad.com)

How many more have to die?

How many more teens will be driven to the brink, surrounded on all sides by nothing but bigotry and hate, often coming even from their own parents, before something is done to protect them?

How many more, before schools and parents and youth organizations realize that something must be done?

And that something can’t be “We’re sending you to conversion therapy so you can hate who you are even more.”

That something can’t be telling them that the way they were born was a choice, and that choice means that God hates them, that the World hates them, that they are wrong.

This is not suicide. This is murder by proxy, and the blood is on the hands of the bullies who have convinced these children that the only option is death. Of every parent to make their gay child hate themselves, of every teacher that ignored the signs. It’s on the hands of every homophobe who has made an offhand comment or joke in the hearing of a random stranger who was struggling, on the inside, with coming to terms with who they are.

It is time to reach out to these teens, to tell them they are not alone, that others have been through the same things and survived, and thrived. Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project is a good start.  I am, in fact, working on a video of my own for the project. The Trevor Project is a good start. But in order for these things to work, the teens out there who are struggling with their identity need to know about them.

The GLBT community needs to reach out, but more than that, the straight caregivers, teachers, counselors, school administrators – they all need to know how to deal with these issues. They all need to know what resources are out there.  And they need to start allowing representatives of the GLBT community into their schools to talk to students about these issues.

But more than that, it’s time to get angry. It’s time to fight the hate.  Too many have died.

Will you stand by and wait for more to die before you do something? Before you come out and stand proud and say “This is NOT OKAY, and I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!”

Related articles

• A Troubling Trend: Discussing Bullying and Antigay Attitudes (learning.blogs.nytimes.com)
• A Letter To Gay Youth & America From Bette Midler (perezhilton.com)
• Hot line serves as 24/7 lifeline for struggling gay youths (cnn.com)
• Gay Teen Suicides: Why We’re Honoring National Coming Out Month (gayrights.change.org)
• “Project Runway: Tim Gunn Speaks Out Against Recent Teen Suicides” and related posts (realitytvmagazine.sheknows.com)

Well,  I didn’t get my Banned Books Week post up, on account of my being a Doofus™ and locking my keys (along with my thumb drives and all writing projects) in my house last Friday. But, needless to say, banning books is a horrible thing that cheats people out of the best thing that any person can have: The opportunity to learn.

Sometimes, to learn, you have to read books  that come from a different worldview than your own. And sometimes, there are those books that have people that are very like you in them, that give you hope that you are not the only one like you out there after all, that you are not alone.

And those books are the best books of all, and, unfortunately, often the most frequently banned.

And now, for another excerpt. This one takes place after Jack and Nate reach the river.

Jack was gone when Nate woke up, and he called out several times for the old man before giving up and standing up, picking up the long coat and putting his arms into the sleeves, shoving them up his arms, the tail of the coat dragging in the dirt. He rummaged in his backpack for several moments, but he’d eaten all of the snacks he’d brought already.

“Jack!” Nate called. He kicked at the soot of the burned out fire. “Jack?”

There was no answer except the angry squawks of a flock of birds frightened by his yelling. They settled back down into the tree above him slowly, shedding down and feathers here and there like grey snow.

Nate sighed and tugged the backpack up onto his shoulder. He stared off in the direction that Jack had pointed the night before, in the direction the water was flowing.

“Well, rivers go to the ocean, right?” Nate said to himself, more to chase away the quiet than anything. He started off, alone, along the river-bank, forcing a soft humming of a tune that his mom used to like to sing, before the man had come along.

He’d not been able to answer or even understand Jack’s question. He’d known that he had to get away from the man, that he couldn’t stay at that house anymore. He knew what he was running away from. As scary as the woods and swamp had been, they weren’t as scary as that house.

With Jack, though, the woods hadn’t seemed all that scary. Now, with Jack gone, the trees seemed to lean over him and the shifting logs in the river all seemed to be oddly menacing. He jumped as a turtle splashed the water near him, coming up to get a breath.

“What’cha doin’, boy?”

Nate startled, turning around quickly, ready to run. It was Albert, with the strange dog close at his heels.

“Walking,” Nate said, narrowing his eyes. Albert seemed nice enough and didn’t look like what Nate would call a bad guy, but then The Man hadn’t at first either. The dog, however, was glaring at him with its lip raised, not quite growling.

“You don’t wanna go that way, boy,” Albert said. “Go much farther, you’ll be in the swamp.”

“All rivers lead to the ocean, and there’s people at the ocean. Big cities and stuff,” Nate said.

“This ain’t a normal sort of river boy, it twists and turns and slows down and spreads out ‘fore it heads to the ocean,” Albert shook his head. “You ought not listen to the old man, boy, he gone lead you wrong. Led me wrong, once upon a time.”

Nate didn’t look so sure. “He’s helped me, he took care of me. He’s going to show me the way.”

“The way to what, boy? That way ain’t nothin’ but gators and snakes and them folks what would as soon eat a boy like you as a chicken. They does voodoo in that swamp.”

“Voodoo?”

“Witchy women, do things with feathers and innards what’ll turn a grown man’s head, and you ain’t nowhere near a grown man,” Albert looked him over, sneering at the coat dragging in the dirt. “You oughta run home to mommy, little boy. Forget you ever decided to come runnin’ into these woods.”

“I can’t,” Nate sighed. “Not yet. The man’s still there. I can’t go home or help Mom or Lizzy or anybody. Not yet. I don’t know how.”

“The man your Daddy?”

“No,” Nate shook his head. He didn’t want to say any more.

Albert spat into the dirt.

Nate turned back in the direction the river ran, walking along Albert and his dog followed at a distance. Now and then Albert tried to talk to him again, telling him things about how Jack was leading him to his death, was going to feed him to the gators and the snakes, but Nate ignored him. He didn’t know what else to do. He didn’t know where he was or where to go, and Jack had shown him a path. In the absence of any other options, he followed the way that had been pointed out to him.

He acknowledged that he knew nothing about either man, that he knew that the police had been after Jack when he met him. He could be a bad man. They both could be bad men, the kind that take kids away and do bad things to them, the sorts of things that the adults never really explained when they were saying they were bad.

After a while the river went around a bend and Nate followed it. Albert and the dog were still behind him, though further away. Albert seemed reluctant to keep going after him, the further he went.

The swamp was a bad place, Albert said.

Nate clambered around the knobby knees of a cypress tree and over a fallen log. He skirted a wide and generous path around a sleeping alligator that looked about as long as him, all teeth and jaws. It paid him no attention, but Nate kept glancing back for a while. Albert and the dog stopped following him, after the alligator.

Late in the afternoon, Nate came across the boat. It was tiny, made of aluminum and painted olive green. Two boards had been put across it in lieu of actual seats. There were no paddles, only a long, knobby pole about the diameter of Nate’s wrist.

Nate sat down in the boat. It seemed a safe enough place, and he was tired and hot. He reached into one of the nearly bottomless pockets of Jack’s coat and found the half-smashed loaf of bread, then folded the coat over one of the wooden boards that served as a seat. He ate a couple of pieces thoughtfully, watching a heron in the tree stretch its long neck and flap its wings, though it didn’t take off from its branch. This late in the afternoon it was hot and sweltering, too hot for the heron to bother flying and too hot for the alligators to think of food. Gnats gave the world a speckled, fuzzy appearance as they buzzed about, and waterbugs skimmed along the surface of the river, occasionally snapped up by fish. Nate tore a slice of bread into pieces and let them fall into the water, where a large turtle snapped them up gratefully.

Nate splashed a little of the tepid water onto his face and into his hair to cool off, then pulled the book out of his backpack and began to read of wizards and elves and magic.

© 2010 – Jennifer L. Davis