The Total Femme

Tex and I are both reading a recent novel by Nancy Lord, pH, a lucky find for me browsing the stacks the other day at a local library. Set in and around a university in Fairbanks, Alaska, the characters are all involved in ocean research, especially having to do with deleterious changes caused by human fuckery. At one point, one character says something about how 99% of livable space is in the ocean, which gave us both pause. The devastating effect of our reckless behavior with fossil fuels and other shitty, stupid, thoughtless, selfish grabbing, is incredibly painful to contemplate. This beautiful novel, while not skirting that truth, manages to hold up other human traits that are much more positive and hopeful. I highly recommend it!

Here in Provincetown, MA, where Tex and I are spending our vacation, we are at ground zero. The hype around the 400^th anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing is really heating up. Not being talked about too terribly much, at least not that I’ve seen, is the part about how those lauded founding fathers massacred the people already living here and plundered the land and the creatures of the sea, creating damage that effect us all even now. Today, I want to hold up a local organization working, among other things, to both document and educate about the North Atlantic Right Whale, which faces extinction, despite having been declared an endangered species some time ago. The dire outlook on their survival is a result of our and our ancestors’ actions, and we are responsible, in some deep connected ways, to these animals.

Center for Coastal Studies and Nancy Lorde, you both get a pingy-dingy! Thank you, CCS, for your dedication to the Right Whale and to all the other often-slogging and thankless work that you do. Thank you, Nancy, for helping us think about how to continue on in the face of so much soul-shattering news.

http://coastalstudies.org/right-whale-research/

http://www.writernancylord.com/

I’m a typewriter whompin’, card catalogue lovin’ white girl from back in the day, and I yearn for a time before the covers of trade paperbacks were all squidgy, so you can imagine that I don’t actually understand what a pingback is. I do know that it can in some way be part of spreading the love, and since that’s what I’m all about at The Total Femme… every Wednesday, I pay homage to the laughter, love, and inspiration to be had elsewhere online.

At the Total Femme, my intention is to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday and Femme Friday on Friday. Rather than play catch-up in a stressful fashion on those weeks when life prevents posting, I have decided to just move gaily forward: if I miss a Monday, the next post will be on Wednesday, and so on. Thank you, little bottle of antibiotics for inspiring me in this! (“…if it’s almost time for the next dose, skip the missed dose and continue your regular dosing schedule. Don’t take a double dose to make up for a missed one.”)