So....

I like traditional songs. And, I like a lot of hymns. I really do. They're often quite lovely.

Of course, I don't, y'know, believe them - and somehow, I find it more uncomfortable to be singing words I don't believe than to be singing songs about murder and whatnot.

Is it ethically dubious for me to alter the words of hymns (those which aren't beautiful outside of the music, because I generally can't do as well as they do in making up words if I like them already) to be something... less wrong for me to sing? I don't mind singing general songs-about-God, so long as they're vague and don't really, uh, talk about God in anything other than an abstract sense. Or anything Biblical - stories are okay, commandments not so much. I don't know why some things pass my internal filters and others don't.

I'd just go ahead and change them, but some people (my mom) got on my case for singing Amazing Grace to the tune of Clementine, so....

(Her exact words were "You're gonna burn. Can you go sit over there? I don't want to get struck by lightning." She was being facetious. I think.)

In other news, I need to find me some sheet music for the piano. Some nice, affordable sheet music. I need to start practicing again - I forget how to read music if I don't do it often.

In other OTHER news, I need to find more people queueing up to make me icons. I have a lot of quotes, mostly LeGuin, but some not, that I want iconified, and I'm still to lazy to figure out how to do it myself.

Person-first feelings?

I just saw a comment by somebody where they said "I have a lot of bitterness and anger over this", instead of the more straightforward "I still am bitter and angry".

One of the goals of The Infamous Person-First Language is to deliberately separate the disability from the person. The person comes first. The person is separate from the disability.

Which works for some things, but not for others. I certainly wouldn't be me if my brain weren't the way it is. And, arguably, nobody who is disabled would be the same person without that disability - the experiences of our lives shape who we are.

The more obvious result of person-first language is, of course, to verbally make the disabled person even *more* different and stigmatized - we don't, after all, separate positive qualities in this way. I'm not a person with intelligence, or femaleness or even heterosexuality.

And the same goes for emotions. I've seen this usage before. And nobody would ever say "I have a lot of happiness about this". I don't think they'd even say "I have a lot of sadness". But anger, fear, these are bad emotions. So they get the special treatment?

It doesn't seem fair, and it doesn't seem right. I don't distance myself from my good emotions, the ones that are socially acceptable to feel. If I'm happy (and I know it!), I'm happy. If I'm sad, I'm sad. And if I'm angry, that anger is a part of me while I feel it - it's not something I can take away like a bit of luggage. I don't have anger, I am angry. And if I am, there's probably a good reason for it.

Moreover, why does anger get to be a bad one? "It's not good to be angry". Even I believe that, to an extent - but that's not true. It's fine to be angry, if the anger is deserved. It's great if your anger causes you to do something productive. Anger caused the civil rights movement. Anger isn't bad if we deal with it properly, use it to send us to fix the problem.

But I'm not sure you can do that if you treat it like something scary you should avoid. Something you have rather than something that's in you when you feel it.

Of course, it's also entirely possible that it's 1:41 in the morning and I am reading waaaaaay too much into this.