Let’s queer everything at work
The trouble wasn’t that the lights were tangled (that’s not a problem - they just are what they are if they are tangled) it was figuring out where the plug and prong were and if they went together even if they looked like they would. The lights were already pre-disposed and wrapped around individual branches of the entire … Aha! There: a nice, firm, green, robust tree with lights - so straight and erect when proper.
I spread the tightly bound fingers of individual branches apart; stuck them in all different directions. I worked in a circular way and moved from the bottom of the tree to the very top. Tousling. When I found the very end of the plug-in and met the outlet- lights. Dangling bobbles of all shapes, sizes and colours reminds me of pretty earrings on soft earlobes.
This all wasn’t exactly in the job description but I’m enjoying it.
P: “For the (5 year olds), I picked up a… what is that word where you draw and make designs?”
me: “Spirographs?”
P: “Yes - but these aren’t just any kind. They’re fancy. For girls.”
P: “I also picked out this puzzle that can be viewed in three-dimensions.”
me: “That is so great! … This could be for boys and girls, right?”
P: “Yes, that would work. And then for the girls (a different age), I also got them rollers, curlers, you know -all that good stuff”
I want to trouble this.
I want to trouble Santa -but I also don’t want to do that.
Let the queerness -as gift- unwrap itself and undo itself and unfold itself and reveal itself and out itself from any box it is tucked in - in time.
Why is being queer so important?
I feel like my queerness is a throbbing, fresh, accident, clothed: like that time in grade one when my mum dropped me off to school and as I waved to say goodbye my finger fell slightly inbetween the door of my mother’s Volkswagon as I closed it and then I held my sobs, it hurt. Then my mum asked me to come back into the car to see what was wrong - my finger was purple. I cried. It was the middle one and she drove me to emergency where they asked me to rest my elbow down and stick up my middle-finger as they took an x-ray. It wasn’t broken - my finger.
This was about twenty years ago.
People were snickering and I didn’t understand why. Now I know, they were laughing at my finger under the glorius light, and the first sign of -
This isn’t an accident.