Tom Sullivan Appreciation Post....

 It would be wild if this came up in his Google Alerts one day. Maybe we'll talk online sometime--now that I know he's still among the living and he knows I'm a fan, well, stranger things have happened.

 I bet I’m not the only Crip of A Certain Age  who spent at least some Wednesday nights of her childhood soaking in America’s ambivalence about disability by watching “Highway To Heaven” sometimes…it was kind of threadbare representation, but for many years, as close as I got.I kind of envied those televised crips in equal parts, both for getting to explode in anger about their disabilities, and that they only wanted to do it in one, dramatic burst. There might be a lot more I might say about HTH if Everything wasn’t so nuts, but it’s all sentimental cliches anyway.

One of the best things about the show though is blind actor, writer, and representational one-man band Tom Sullivan who was the best thing about a lot of Very Special Episodes when I was growing up.  My brother and I shared an obsession with watching “If You Could See What I Hear,” especially the part where Tom drives his college friends home because he was sober when they weren’t.--HBO was different before the whole Golden Age thing started up--they showed the same things, but I don't think they were in the local TV Guide a lot, so to see your movie all the way through could take a few tries, anyway, butIf You Could See What I Hear held up to frequent rewatch.  (The movie is online, but I'm not sure what the rules are...don't want to get people in trouble.

 

They See Me Rolling, They Hatin'

 and, well, people are passing me up right now, so, just in case:

I have cerebral palsy, use a wheelchair, and I’m on AHCCCS (Medicaid in some places) to pay my attendants. Needing so much support for so many years (I’m fifty-one, on benefits for about thirty years) wasn’t really part of my plan. But I still deserve to live (; I bet surviving would feel better to me if I didn’t fee punished, periodically, by budget cuts, austerity, and inaccessibility. Not that my spirits are really the government’s problem, I suppose, but in their place, I hope I’d not choose to cause pain and disruption to people I never even knew. Everybody Poops, after all) I have a family, friendships and community that I contribute to, despite the ways that it’s uncounted by the Gross Domestic Product., which massively undercounts women’s work in general, by the way I believe that some things are necessities that it’s inhumane to make people fight for, or at the very least, struggle with paperwork to make it look like they’re doing something but really just creates frustrating and costly hurdles for people trying to meet their most elemental needs, without a lot of advantages. Some people may not have family networks that they can lean on—I do, but we never know how long all of that might last. Paperwork may pretend to offer a guarantee, but real life does not. The United States is the richest society that has EVER existed; does taking food aid away in the budget bill make sense? I say no, even if I haven’t gotten SNAP since college.  Sometimes it’s about our neighbors, not just usI

One More Thing...

This link may be better If you have not contacted Congress about their plans to cut Medicaid to give billionaires a tax break,

sign a letter here

(If we don't hang together, we may hang separately.)

Could "reality" be Conscious?

 

Mostly, I’d say that a lot of reality television, despite being born of the human curiosity about how people live in different places and stations of life, deserves its shallow reputation. So much of what it shows is fighting and expensive objects.

  It doesn’t really have to be that way, though, as I found catching up on the latest iteration of Queer Eye on streaming recently.(My heart kind of belongs to the original Fab 5, but the 2020s version is growing on me. )

 Maybe even more so now that I’ve seen them make over deaf athletic director Denton Mallas. Because of my own disability experience, I hadn’t thought much of special schools or self-contained programs, but if more of us had a culture to connect with as they do at places like Gallaudett and the school Denton works at, maybe it wouldn’t be so wrong.  I enjoy my hearing, but I admire some Deaf people’s commitment to their own culture and traditions.

I thought the episode was groundbreaking in its willingness to learn and not just reflect back prejudices of the dominant culture while still being fun to watch(Denton is a hottie, for one thing) I enjoyed the Fab 5’s willingness to learn.And, because I am both behind the times and an ignorant hearing person in many ways, I'm including a response from a deaf blogger from right after the episode dropped here

Feeling Like A Reject...

 

I’m almost sure the editor at Big Suspense Story Magazine (Not their real name, obvs) didn’t really know how much I needed that little burst of hope that started off my January.  Or how much having something come out in a nationally-available magazine that leans so heavily on my own, disability, experience might have given me some optimism at a time that makes it hard to find. Maybe even closer to impossible, but I hadn’t known how important placing the story I’d had sitting around for about ten years felt to me until it didn’t happen this week.   I was so determined to do something unspecified to try to make “For Ladies Only” my Big Break in a way I hadn’t managed when I was in BSM last, during the Great Recession.  I guess I could have shelved that particular anxiety, possibly forever, along with the contrived ones about work-life balance and Handling Early Success.

They didn’t do it *to* me, but scurrying around to cut over a thousand words just to have someone pass—well, it’s hard not to feel that way. (Not really sure what changed between January and May, but in the immediate moment, not wanting to blow my fifteen minutes of fame, or virality, on hurt feelings, I exaggerated my level of excitement with my novel (.

Although “Wedded Twist” is flowing along in all its wackiness, it’s hard to connect with my teenaged self who always used to stop by the Js in the bookstore so that I might see the spot on the shelf where my book might one day appear.  I don’t imagine that, anymore. I’m not sure what to replace that image with, a lot of wishes seem out of reach.

If I post this, my wish to quit writing is kind of half-hearted, but not completely gone. Wondering if I don’t have something important that real talents have, besides a romantic history that might use up my fingers when I count. (Maybe that’s one thing that makes me Every writer, for once.)

Does anyone really like the happy-talk rejections? Does anyone really think we’re all *so great*(if I’m so great, publish me!) Kind of rubs it in for them to say “Got anything else?” when I want to extend a well-shaped middle digit.