Lots of time to think and write!

So... today is the third day in a row that I have woken up at 4:30 AM and kept going all day. Strangely enough, I had thought this would be tiring, but it's actually turning out to be rather energizing... spending a few hours in the morning reading, chanting, eating breakfast at lesiure, and writing for a while before I go to work. It's more to do, but now I feel I have a life again that goes beyond work... and that is significantly taking away from, rather than adding to, my stress levels. So, is it easier to maintain a discipline if you enjoy it? I don't know, but I hope so! These mornings before sunrise are hard, but I wouldn't trade them for any other mornings... I just need a way to remember that at the moment that the alarm sounds!

More conversations and ranting around the disability issue today. Had several wonderful conversations about that with different people at work today, the longest and most detailed (and, I'll admit, most emotional!) with my supervisor, but other equally important ones with various other colleagues too. Felt really good, now need to translate them into action. How do we sensitize ourselves, and the young we work with, to this kind of difference as well? How do we start including disability issues into our sessions on stereotypes, identities, power, etc.? How do we, despite constraints of funding etc, create an office space that can, physically and otherwise, welcome people with different kinds of needs and abilities? A lot of very crucial questions that i need to start finding feasible ways of addressing... even if just to maintain my own sanity and my love for the organization I work in. So there i go again, creating more work for myself but not (yet) regretting it!

The discussions I had today, though, were very interesting. I thought of Phat and Majid Tehranian and their insistence that a totally different kind of learning happens when you teach someone... different context, but in trying to explain all the thoughts, emotions, joys, and frustrations I was bringing to the table, I understood SO much about my own feelings around the issue; I was able to artciulate concepts that I had never fully even conceptualized. Like, when i felt unable to explain the condesc.ension that is implicit in the phrase "S/he has achived so much despite being disabled," I asked how my listener would respond to "She has achieved so much despite being a woman"... totally politically incorrect, of course. Well, then, why is that ok to say about a disabled person... and more often than not (or at least as often as not), it is said about disabilities that may not even have a direct bearing on the person's work... anymore than being a woman and having all the home responsibilties (still hardly shared between sexes) has a bearing on hers. So then? Of course, no example works as a direct explanation of another, but they did begin to drive home a point-- including, especailly, to me-- about how we treat disability as a different kind of difference, when it may not actually be that different in some ways. Not sure where we are going with that, but the process of articulating it all helps me figure out my own stances... and how much I am willing to fight and what I am willing to fight for. That's something.

Ideas/ suggested resources anyone? Send them in, please!