sci-fi, mary doria russell, god and evil, my gender queerness, makeup for trans women, don quixote, george orwell, body and soul
yesterday i was grateful for the twilight zone new year marathon and a delicious dessert holly made...
today i am looking forward to resuming my normal routine...
i finished a sci-fi book by mary doria russell1 titled the sparrow2... an amazing book that addresses the existence of evil in the face of a benevolent god... this is a question i think about a lot... i don't believe in god, at least not any kind of omnipotent god, compassionate or not... so i come at it from a different angle... what is the purpose of compassion in a cosmos that appears to care not at all about good or evil except through intelligent beings?... what is the purpose of love?... of "the better angels of our nature"?... i can't see that we started in a state of grace... at best, i think life is moving towards a state of grace?... intelligence does and will amount to something?... there is a kind of devine perfection we are building towards?... or, things just are as they are, will be what they will be, and there is no meaning to it... we prefer that there be some kind of meaning, but we are all too aware that suffering and brutality often argue against that meaning... i highly recommend the book... a smart, very well told story that sticks the landing...
one of my aspirations for the new year is to deepen my genderqueer explorations... i will seek out more gender queer community... i will seek out sources of knowledge about gender queerness... what it has been historically... what it is now... and i will deepen my genderqueer self expression...
a couple of days ago a youtube video, makeup for trans women 101 by stef sanjati... it's really good... she's really good... but wow, what a lot of work it will be to make myself up as thoroughly as she proposes in the video... she's much younger than i am and has the benefit of facial feminization surgery... i can't get younger and i am too old to go through surgery... so i will be looking to use makeup to feminize my appearance with the goal of being a womanly man... my plan is to start slowly and minimally and experiment to see if i can arrive at a look appropriate for my age and the condition of my skin... my progress or not will become apparent in the selfies i generally start these posts with...
some evidence of reading i did this morning...
Austin Kleon ā Orwell on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza
There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin.
The Art of Donald McGill | The Orwell Foundation
Who does not know the ācomicsā of the cheap stationersā windows, the penny or twopenny coloured postcards with their endless succession of fat women in tight bathing-dresses and their crude drawing and unbearable colours, chiefly hedge-sparrowās-egg tint and Post Office red?
some interesting questions about myself arise with this one...
āIf the body is not the soul, what is the soul?ā wrote Walt Whitman in his heroic revolt against the lasting tyranny of Descartes, whose dismissal of the body and disdain for the soul may be the single most damaging ideological misstep of modernity.
now... what is my attempt to feminize my appearance and outward expression but an attempt to unite my feminine leaning soul with my physical reality?...
some photos from this morning...
Mary Doria Russell - Wikipedia - Russell's first two novels, The Sparrow and its sequel Children of God (1998)āsometimes called the Sparrow series[3] or Emilio Sandoz sequence[1]ā(Random House Villard in 1996 and 1998) are a pair of speculative fiction novels focused on the religious and psychological implications of first contact with aliens. Both explore the problem of evil (theodicy) and how to reconcile a benevolent, omniscient, all-powerful deity with lives filled with undeserved suffering.↩
[The Sparrow (novel) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sparrow_%28novel%29 - The Sparrow**_ %281996) is the first novelby author Mary Doria Russell. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, James Tiptree Jr. Award, Kurd-LaĆwitz-Preisand the British Science Fiction Association Award. It was followed by a sequel, _Children of God_, in 1998. The title refers to Gospel of Matthew10:29--31, which relates that not even a sparrow falls to the earth without God's knowledge thereof.↩