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I e-mailed the Facilities manager at uni with documentation of the total accessibility fail at the uni med centre last night. I got a reply today saying he was going to investigate the situation and get back to me. Neat.
Today, I'm going out to file my name change application. While I'm in town I also plan to buy a new music stand, as I've managed to break the old one pretty thoroughly. Then, if I have time, I'm going to pop down to Fremantle Prison (no, really) to do a tour, and possibly make a booking to do a Torchlight Tour, then stop by a grocery shop and come home. (Freo Prison may be tomorrow.)
I'll probably be exhausted at the end of all this, but I'm pretty sure it's within my capacity. And, you see, I'm pretty sure I'm at the point in recovery-from-illness where what I need to do is get my body into active mode, get my metabolism/circulation into gear. Plus, I really want to go to Fremantle Prison - I went once, on a school trip in high school (disconcertingly, I now realise this was only about two years after the prison closed - for some reason I thought it closed many years before that), but now I can go in possession of a good camera. Most particularly, one that can take photos in dim lighting conditions without flash - I've always wanted to have photos of some of the cell murals and so on, and flash photography is forbidden there (with good reason). And they have an exhibition on that I want to see.
Meanwhile, I've just had a thought, reading something else entirely, about racial identity.
See, one of the things that's brought up, reasonably often, is that white people don't Identify As White. This is elaborated, rightly, to consider that whiteness is treated as a kind of default in our society; not having to treat ethnic identity as intrinsic to general identity is white privilege.
But I've just placed why it might be that I think so many Well-Meaning White People, including me, find it uncomfortable to identify deliberately as white.
See, in some respects I think we should. If non-white people find their ethnicity a part of their Identity, but white people can leave it unspoken, it's still perpetuating the white is default thing; if we don't say, then we're somewhat perpetuating an idea that everyone on the internet is assumed white until proven otherwise.
And yet, I would be skeeved as hell listing whiteness as a characteristic in a profile of myself that didn't have a specific field for it.
Because people who Identify As White have a strong likelihood of being white supremacists, and nobody who isn't one wants anyone to think they're a white supremacist. (Even a lot of white supremacists don't. They're white "nationalists".)
So if I described myself as, say, "28 years old, white, female," I'd worry that would make people think I was the kind of person who'd vote One Nation/BNP/choose your racist party here. (And applaud me for omitting Liberal/Conservative/Republican there.) (Hilarity, that the Australian Liberal Party is the equivalent of the UK Conservative Party.)
So I'll say I'm white if it's relevant in conversation online (in person, I generally assume people can tell), but making a point of it is a special kind of uncomfortable.
Note that I'm not saying the people who are all "... but I don't IDENTIFY as white, I'm [nationality]!" aren't frequently being douchebags, because... they are.
I'm still thinking about this, but I'm interested in what other people think.
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