Storms

It was raining, but it wasn't the usual boring rain of London that she'd come to know so well. It was  a storm. A real storm. A storm that reminded her of childhood summers, of nights spent curling up on her blue armchair looking out at the rain, waiting for flashes of lightning and counting until the thunder could be heard. She hadn't seen a storm like that here, so she had gathered her warm covers around herself, and sat next to her bedroom window, staring at the rain.

She couldn't have told you what she found so enthralling, the raindrops hitting the earth violently, the plays of shadows and light, the darkness and the damp, but she knew storms were special, she knew that on storm nights magic was closer to her world than ever, and strange things could happen.

She must have dozed off watching the rain, but when she woke up her throat was dry, and her muscles felt cramped, she opened her eyes frowning, uncomfortable and tried to stretch out, thinking she should go to bed, but the storm hadn't ended, her curtains were drawn and the window was open. She tried to think back in alarm, wondering whether she'd opened it before she'd fallen asleep. She was having trouble moving, as though her limbs were responding too slowly, and the panic started settling in, spiraling into her stomach, flooding her mouth with the metallic taste of blood. She spat out, tears in her eyes, scared, but it was only saliva.

Taking deep breaths she tried to look around. Nothing seemed different in her room, but she could feel a presence, she could sense something was there that shouldn't be. Yet everything seemed to be in order, exactly as she'd left it, except the window. She tried to move again, and this time it came easier, as though her limbs were waking up from a long sleep. She stood up, bunching her covers around herself as though they could somehow protect her. She closed the window, feeling uneasy as she did so, wondering if she was trapping in something that should not be in her room. Then she turned to face the mirror. She looked pale and scared, her hair was messed up from the position where she'd been sleeping, but there was nothing unusual about her. She almost laughed out loud. She had always been scared of mirrors, a fear born of the stories that she'd read in her childhood, that if you looked into a mirror at midnight you would see your own death. She had dared the mirrors many times, alone and with her friends, and all she'd ever seen was herself. She had always felt relief afterwards, and a sense of foreboding: maybe seeing nothing meant something, maybe she was misinterpreting what she saw in the mirror. Then suddenly she let out a panicked gasp. The window reflected in the mirror was open. She turned around, but her window was closed. She had just closed it. She turned back to the mirror, petrified with fear and stared at the storm raging, the curtains flapping in the wind, the wrong reflection. She blinked and it was gone. The window was closed, and she was there, trembling in fear, and next to her, overlapping, was a shadow of herself, a ghost, a copy that wasn't solid. She looked scared too, rooted to the spot, staring at herself, or at her other self, in the mirror.

-Liz? Are you alright?

She heard her dad's voice, his footsteps coming down the corridor, and suddenly understood. This wasn't her house, that wasn't her father, and she was the intruder.

-Yeah! I'm... I'm OK, just fell asleep with the window open. -she lied, her voice shaking, knowing that she did not want to see this stranger who would look like her father and treat her like his daughter but who was just a stranger, who didn't love her, who did not know her.

She wanted to go back to her room. To her real room. This other place was horrifying. It was the same, and she knew no one else could tell the difference. Her parents whom she was supposed to have known for 20 years would not be able to understand that their daughter wasn't the same daughter, that she wasn't her, that they'd somehow changed places in the storm.

-Do you always watch storms with the window open?- she asked the ghost of herself, or perhaps herself, not really caring about the answer, but trying to concentrate on something different, something that wasn't the fact that she was trapped somewhere else, where nobody knew her and she could not get back.

And suddenly something snapped. Lightning and thunder came together and she woke up, sitting on her armchair, her mouth dry, her limbs a little sore, but perfectly capable of moving. The window was closed, and when she looked into the mirror the window in the mirror was closed too. The ghost wasn't there anymore.

-Liz? Are you OK hon?

And that was her dad.

-Everything's fine Dad, I had a nightmare.

He walked into the room, and saw her sitting on her armchair.

-Watching the storm?- he asked, smiling. She remembered they'd watched them together when she was a child. She nodded. -What did you dream?

-It wasn't a dream exactly. I think I woke up and I had this horrible feeling of irreality, like I was in a parallel universe, like you and mum weren't yourselves. Everything was the same, but I felt like I didn't belong, like nothing was... mine... -she could not explain it exactly in words. -It was scary.

He nodded and went over to her bookcase.

-I'll never understand how you have your books organised- he said.

She smiled.

-I think I'll go to bed- she said, watching him pick up one of the comics he kept in her room.

-Do you mind if I borrow it? -he said.

-Go ahead.

And as he left the room, she felt the shadow of another leave with him. But she wasn't scared. And for a second, she wondered.

Moral dilemma

The other day, while talking to my dad, he posed a moral dilemma. It was more than that, since this is a real case that has taken place in Italy recently.


Four (or six, depending on the sources) couples go to a hospital for assisted fertility treatements. One of the women gets pregnant with twins, but when she goes to get her babies tested for genetic abnormalities, she and her husband discover that the babies aren't theirs. There's been a mix up with the implanted embryos.

It isn't yet known whether another couple has been implanted with these woman's embryos, and if so, which couple this is, but there is another couple who is sure the babies are theirs and are threatening to sue for the children.

So. Who's the mum? The woman who goes through the pregnancy or the woman who provides the genetic material? Who are the parents?

My immediate answer was that the parents are the genetic parents (I hesitate to say biological, is there anything more biological for a mother than to go through a pregnancy and give birth?), and I still think that, if the embryos weren't donated for a couple who couldn't conceive on their own, the birth woman isn't the mother. She has the right to have an abortion since she is carrying the babies possibly against her will, but she doesn't have a right to them (unless the genetic mother gives them up). My dad thinks I'm wrong though. He thinks that it's more complicated than that, that the birth woman has as much right to the children or more than the genetic mother.

Do any of you have a different idea?

(Hint: The Italian bioethics committee has said that the correct (morally correct: in Italy, the legal mother is the woman who gives birth to the children) thing to do is to share the rearing of the children between the two couples, which is problematic in the sense that it isn't yet known whether a) another couple is pregnant with "this" couple's embryos, or b) who the actual parents of "this" couple's embryos are.)

Goodbye

Gabriel García Márquez died today. It is a gigantic loss, an immeasurable loss. We will never know what more he could have written, what other novels, short stories, what other magic.

I never met him, so I cannot write about him. I can only write about myself, about what I thought and felt about his writing. And he was a writer. One of the best Colombia has produced, one of the best South America has produced, one of the best writers in Spanish I have ever read. And let me tell you, it is not easy to write in Spanish. It takes a feeling for the grammar, it takes pace, it takes phrase construction, it takes talent. And he was talented. He could write a short story because he understood it. He knew exactly how to write it.

I only ever read two of his novels "El amor en los tiempos del cólera" ("Love in times of cholera") and "Cien años de soledad" (A hundred years of solitude"). The first was the greatest love story I have ever read. The second was an epic, the story of a family, of a village, of history, of the world. Truthfully, they are not novels, but epics. Gigantic, all-encompassing, indispensable.

I have read many of his short stories. My favourite is probably "La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y su abuela desalmada" ("The incredible and sad story of candid Eréndira and her soulless grandmother"), a sordid story, a story with all of the greater points that make a story good. Because let me tell you, so many stories nowadays, specially children's stories are watered down, sweetened, unsordid. The wonder of stories is their hardness, the fear they instill. A short story has to chill you to the bone, and then bring you back to warmth, but never let you forget that the mysterious, the awful, the monstrous exists. This is especially true in children's stories. Their magic is in the evil enemies and the punishments, not in the happy endings (many of which were not present in the original versions).

Anyway. That doesn't really matter today. Today Gabo died, and anyone whoever read him feels that the world is a little more boring, a little sadder for the loss. Goodbye.

Identity

After a lot of Twitter, a bit of Facebook and a fair bit of being back home (somehow I always get pulled down to earth when I come back home), I have concluded that I need to back off feminism for a bit.

Even as I write it, it doesn't read right, you can't really "back off" feminism, you either are, or you aren't a feminist (this is, you either identify as a feminist or you don't). Problem is, I am a lot more than a feminist, and feminist writing and feminist activism takes up a lot of time, a lot of mental space, and a lot of energy. At some level, I feel like I'm betraying some ideals by saying this, but deep down I know I'm right. I am not a feminist first. I am a person.

I am a person who loves reading and writing, creative writing. I haven't done a lot of that lately. I am a person who is about to finish a degree. I am a person with the world at her feet (sort of), a person who loves traveling, languages, biology, music, art (sometimes), history, American politics, arguing, debating. I am a person who talks and talks and talks and talks about pretty much anything I have any idea about. I am a person.

The reason I feel like I need to say this is because, people (especially women) who take up writing about feminism seem to lose all of this in favour of their feminism. They are feminists first. They see the world from a feminist viewpoint and they view nearly every issue as being feminist affected. Though I understand this, because I tend to do it myself, in their writing it tends to invisibilise who they are. There are some people who I know as feminists, and I don't know anything else about them. I like feminism. I think it is necessary, and I feel incredibly grateful to the people who are dedicated to it, to the people who are feminists first. But I feel that in a world where feminism wasn't necessary, where women and men were treated equally, people would be people. They would read books, and listen to music, and write stories and walk their dog. I want to be a person first.

This doesn't mean that I am going to stop writing about feminism. If I find something that I find blatantly sexist, or a matter that interests me that has a particularly large feminist factor I will probably write about it. All I'm saying is that I'm going to slow down a little bit. There are things that I will not look at from a feminist perspective, because I don't believe that feminism necessary permeates everything, I will write about other things, I will try to reflect here that I'm not just a feminist.

The title of the post is Identity. It is common to hear people say "I identify as a feminist". I do. I will not stop saying that I am a feminist. But you know what? I'm also the owner of the handsomest dog in the world (Trotski), the hugest Harry Potter fan, a (bad) viola player, a student, an adoptive Londoner and a native abulense, a music enjoyer, a drinker of bad wine and good rum, and a lot of things more. I am not just a feminist. This is not a feminist blog.

Tired

I've just started my third argument since I went on Facebook and Twitter this morning. Trying to make someone understand that publishing and sharing personal information about people on the web, whatever they may have done, is not a legitimate way to go about things, especially if their families might be affected.

I believe this.

The first argument was about the pay gap between men and women and whether it exists or not, the second was on Twitter and wasn't so much an argument as a discussion, again about the pay gap, how it affects Latina and black women disproportionately (women of colour in general, but these were the groups I had information for, and the fact is it affects Asian women slightly less than other women, including white women, but anyways)... Anyway doesn't matter.

The fact is, that by the time I was writing the third reply to this third argument I was tired. Tired of getting angry, tired of not understanding how people don't see basic injustice, tired of the argument. And it made me understand why people don't argue more, don't protest more, don't get angry more. It's exhausting. The easy path is to let things go, to pretend they're not happening, to go to sleep without giving the argument all you have.

And this leads me to admire every single person out there who has raised their voice again and again and again against injustice. I don't care if it's on the mainstream media, on Twitter or on the bus. Whether you're arguing with a friend and calling them out on something they said or going to a protest, whether your part of all the human rights societies you can find and you're an activist or you just try to do a little bit for your own community. I want to say thank you. Because it's exhausting. Not just trying to make other people understand why it's wrong, not just trying to change people's minds, but just making the effort to educate oneself, to try and not make these mistakes.

Yes. Today I'm tired. I don't want to argue anymore. I don't want to fight. I want to give up and go to bed. But I worry. Because if we all just gave up and went to bed the world would be a much more terrible place. So thank you to all the people who don't give up the fight.

Good night.