Passing

First time director Rebecca Hall makes a movie about passing for white. Her mother was a black opera singer who was light-skinned and so the subject matter invited itself as a matter of personal interest. 

Set in 1929, protagonist Irene Redfield is recognized in a very nice restaurant by former high school friend Claire who is now living her life passing as white. Irene is shocked at the physical change even as she herself blends in well to white society under her snuggly-fitting flapper hat. Her brim is lowered at key moments when suspicion threatens her with trouble. 

Irene lives a more affluent life in Harlem than most black people of her time and she and her husband can afford to have a maid. However they are still second class citizens in an America that has always had and continues to have a clear pecking order. 

Claire is living in stealth but is married to a racist white man who has no idea of his wife's origins. She is getting tired of her life and the cover up and it gets increasingly complicated from there. 

The parallels with transgender people invite themselves here. The hierarchy of privilege and how people use it and how messy life is in general.

Frail

The best way to remove power from ill-intentioned people is make them feel small which is accomplished by magnifying their insignificance. 

When we show they don't matter it plays on their already frail egos; a problem which secure people don't have. 

There is nothing more frustrating than removing whatever small grasp on power they think they have.

On another note, this blog has been regularly receiving between 5,000 and 6,000 views per day, a healthy increase which I am at a loss to explain since I have not changed my approach at all. I never have, nor will I ever chase traffic.

However, I will take it I guess.

The why of it all

Online positions and viewpoints on things tend to be hard line and black and white because people often have very fixed ideas on subjects despite their lack of knowledge. 

If we recall Bonhoeffer's three tenets of stupidity: outsourcing critical thinking, willful ignorance and conformity, you can see why so much of what we take in fails the test. 

Nuanced discussions are abandoned in favour of staunch positions that are at best flimsy. They may have an agenda or simply absorbed it from somewhere else and are now preaching it. 

Being comfortable with grays is pretty much mandatory and because we don't have all the answers we must be prepared to say "I don't know" 

The problem is the ego gets in the way of many people who can be derailed very easily by asking a simple question 

"Explain to me logically and clearly why you believe this?"

Gotcha.

"No one is going to save you"

 

Doubt is normal

There will be plenty of times that you doubt your transition (no matter the type) but this is not because it was the wrong thing to do. It is because you are human which comes with the territory. 

You have largely removed yourself from the euphoria dysphoria roller coaster and everyday normal life gets to be routine. 

That doesn't mean your existential angst goes away.That's permanent. 

Little things will go wrong which will then get lumped in with your being transgender which is perfectly normal. 

What would be abnormal is if you never doubted at all.

Rapid fire

Both the internet and plenty of books are full of advice about how to control our thoughts and our minds except that they generally don't work. This doesn't prevent the authors from selling their formulas like a magic elixir. 

The problem is that they advertise something that the human mind cannot adequately achieve. 

Our mind fires off random thoughts at rapid pace and we cannot always process them fast enough. Many of them play on our deepest fears and insecurities. 

The best we can hope for is mitigation and placing them within buckets of seriousness and prioritize them. Even then, just when we think we have achieved a method that works, some new crisis will derail our organization once again. 

That is because the brain is a noise generation machine which means it's output cannot be controlled. We can work on cleaning up our personal issues but that does not mean the mind won't operate any less randomly. 

It's firing tennis balls at us like a catapult and what we need to do is become a better player.

Smell

Trumpism is falling like a house of cards. 

You let an incompetent crook take over the reins of your nation and he wrecks your economy with false hope of jobs coming back and promises of lowering the cost of living. 

The exact opposite happens. Labour is increasingly lost to AI and tariffs sap the funds from bank accounts already depleted from the rising cost brought by inflation. 

It's a cautionary tale to be sure. 

I've been watching this closeup for years now. How the combination of human ignorance, stupidity, gullibility, greed and corruption work in tandem until its too late to reverse the damage. 

Allies are moving on and making deals among themselves because they have little choice. The aggression from a malevolent regime needs to be mitigated and their populations protected from the insanity. 

The people who supported Trump can't wash the stink off and it will remain a permanent part of their legacy. History doesn't allow you to rewrite it; certainly not in an era where everything is recorded in minute detail for digital posterity. 

The whole fiasco will form part of another lesson of what not to do if you want to retain your nation's reputation and political alliances. 

At Lindsey Graham's funeral an attendee sitting behind Trump was treated to one of his bowel movements and the expression of sheer disgust could not be hidden from the cameras. 

It was a moment which will live on to symbolize the entire 10 years of Trump's insurgency into America's political machinery.

Pure stink.

Trust

Do I trust people? Regretably no. My life experience has taught me not to. 

It's a shame this happens to us but over our lifetime we are met with deception, malice and insecurity which burns off any remaining innocence we still retained. 

The more we are marked by life, the more we will be hard pressed to come back to a balance that removes the jaded fatigue we have for people in general. 

We want to get some of that wonder and openness back which requires we let our guard down more than we think is wise. 

Trust implies confidence that the other person has our best interest at heart and that no hidden agenda exists on their part. We also count on a lack of erratic behaviour which can keep us guessing as to when the next crisis point will arrive. 

Trust must be earned and not given away so readily because I have seen too many incidents of both inadvertent and deliberate nature. 

Some people come with so much drama attached to them that they become a magnet for do-gooders ready to help repair them. They move from one unwitting victim to another until they are finally discovered.

We all crave someone who gets us which comes with effort from both parties plus the willingness to drop our deadliest weapons on the floor.

I second that

We may have our share of problems as a society but at least there's never been a better time to be a unique individual. 

I run around Montréal everyday and see every type of person with their own style of dressing and behaviour. No one takes particular notice of anyone else simply because there is too much variety to choose from. 

People have removed the obligation that previous generations adopted and "what will the neighbours think" has been replaced by "It's none of your business". 

I was walking with a neighbor recently who fretted about what to wear to a wedding. Her GenZ granddaughter told her to dress a little nicer than normal but but at the same time opt for what makes you speaks to you and says "this is me".

I second that.

It never changes

The global death toll due to COVID was at minimum 7 million but likely much more since many countries stopped counting after a while. 

Here we had a global pandemic not seen since the early 20th century and measures were undertaken to protect the public while experts determined how to tackle what they were facing. 

The logic was to make sure we protect the most vulnerable by exercising caution through the use of measures that some now say were excessive. Had we done nothing, who knows what the death toll would have been. 

In the US where 1.25 million people died (the highest of any country)  Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky had the highest death rates per capita correlating well with low rates of vaccination there. 

Of course now US conservatives 6 years later want to play Monday morning quarterback and say that the guidelines followed at the time were excessive and that the leading immunology expert in the country (who served under multiple presidents) was lying to them all along. 

Republicans are desperate and need something to hold on to before they get clobbered in the midterms. Dr Fauci will need to be that sacrificial lamb to feed to their dumbfounded base. 

It's a hail Mary pass but you have to try something to distract people from the price of groceries and gas brought to them by the current idiot running the place.

But fear not, it is 2026 and it might as well be the Salem witch trials. Different era, same level of ignorance.

Tough times

I have never in my life seen so many mentally disconnected people running around in public. They are often the ones talking loudly to themselves spouting gibberish. 

We can sometimes become their targets because much of their inhibitions have been greatly diminished. 

Anyone can be a potential target and I have seen people storm off metro cars after having suddenly kicked a seat out of the blue in sheer frustration. 

We are all fair game and I am always extremely cautious and mind my surroundings while keeping my emotions in check. 

I hold my temper and don't react because it would serve no purpose to put someone in their place who isn't balanced. My built up frustration with the negative aspects of this world is best saved for better occasions. 

Many people have lives that don't work at all for them and so they find ways to show their displeasure openly. Sometimes its an open diatribe in the middle of the street where people contour around them at a safe distance immersing faces into phones. 

Einstein was correct when he said that society operates on a great deal of fear, greed and stupidity except that we can try hard to break that cycle and make our presence known to say that we won't stand for it.

We want to make things better.