It's Alive(ish)

 23 people showed up for the PDA disability committee yesterday, and after a momentary failure of nerve, I signed up to be on the Advisory Committee of same.

It's a beginning.

I think it may be something of a challenge to coordinate the access needs of so many different disabilities on kind of a shoestring budget.  I can imagine a few long-time readers thinking  "Well, you do yours...how hard can it be?" but it's different. The way I've learned to "deal with" lapses in access in general is to try to accept there are parts of the job/recreational activity/ whatever that I won't be able to manage. I doubt very much I'd get into another big access fight over "just me", but that's why I've never been able to be a mentor for young advocates.(These people, to their credit, seem disinclined to fake it, but that kind of makes me wonder how we will get on, interpersonally.(Also, have I given up too fast? Not that, of all the things I haven't gotten to do enough of on this planet, wrangling, usually only with partial success, for some kind of wheelchair access, is one of them.. But, as with many things in this life, meeting some assertive strangers made me wonder if I could have gotten farther by pushing harder, at least, sometimes.)

Some of the new people's access needs involve communications, which is an area about which I'm under-informed, but we may not be able to have meetings without addressing it because I don't want to have meetings where people don't understand stuff.

BUFFY

I fight evil, but I don't really win. I'm like the boy who stuck his finger in the duck.

Wish us luck, America.

Green monsters, the dating mines, and other stories...

 

-          After something of a delay, your Bohemian Crip has contacted a potential date for Xav. This one is a poet, which might be nice if we all hang out(especially given that our subject areas don’t overlap sufficiently for the green-eyed monster to be a fifth wheel on that occasion…mostly, I’m joking, maybe the anthology gave me some confidence, even through the frustrations of getting it out there—I can only hope.)

-          --While speaking of green monsters, I can only say I somewhat regret getting outside my comfort zone to watch “The Color of Water”. It just had a bunch of stuff in it that I don’t care about, up to and including the photogenic female lead’s disability that was enough to hold her back a little, but that doesn’t impede either communication or the camera’s urge to male-gaze all over her milky-white body(Shades of the little details community in livejournal, back when.  I’m probably exaggerating, but it does feel like half the questions on there were about creating an injury that, say, holds back the action without making anything gross happen to the injured person. I hope someone as talented as Del Toro, even if I don't share his vision, isn't literally doing the big-money version of that!

-          Octavia Spencer deserved her award, though.
Is it me, or are movies getting increasingly hostile about day-to-day life?(Not that I think we should go full-on Capra and say only working people know what’s what, but… movies are too big, these days, I think.)