Sites & Quotes du Jour

I decided that today I'd take a rest from my own adoption-related crapola and offer some URLs and quotes I stumbled upon and share them with anyone who cares to read them.

1. Speaking of stumbled upon, I linked to StumbleUpon which I discovered on Heartened's blog. It uses thumbs-up/thumbs down ratings "to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like–minded stumblers have liked," it says on its splashpage.

2. And BTW, why are ya still using Internet Exploiter, when you can have Firefox? (I'm thinking of changing servers because the Blogspot image uploader now changes my gif extensions to jpgs, so I can't animate any more. I even wrote tech support, but no reply.)

3. A fellow adoptee sent me this link from the University of Oregon's Adoption History Project. I checked, and as expected, it's an exceptional source of knowledge on the history of adoption with a timeline, people, documents, books, etc. It's well worth a visit when you have some time to spend immersing yourself in the data.

4. Here's one reason I don't affiliate with any religion. I think religion, particularly conventional, organized religion, perpetuates violence. Religions create a "them" and "us"/"mine" and "yours"/ "saved" and "unsaved" mindset. This quote from an article in the April 4, 2006 edition of the Patriot News from Pennsylvania is an example of the ignorance about the ultimate consequences of adoption, rationalized by one person's religious beliefs :

"Even before Ryan and Kellie Argot of Fairview Twp. were married and found they were infertile, they talked about adoption.
"It turned out that was the only way to grow our family," Kellie Argot said.
She and her husband adopted Samuel, 2, and are in the process of adopting Zophia, 8 months. "I can say for both of my children, their birth parents knew they would not be able to give them the home they deserve," she said.
Geer said yesterday that adoption is a great solution for some
children.
Kellie Argot agreed.
"Adoption is a wonderful thing. It's not a negative thing," she said. "Jesus was adopted. When we're baptized, we're adopted into God's family. How bad is that?"

Who is she kidding?

5. One of my all-time favorite blogs isn't about adoption but about creativity. It's the much-loved Wish Jar Journal. I personally love it because it inspires me with a huge smorgasboard of goodies for the soul.

6. An adoptee's life is like a photo with all relatives' faces ripped away. It's looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing nothing there except what others have defined rather than honest links to self. I ripped this quote from Rhonda's Ruminations because it so elequent:

"Perhaps heritage is something not missed until it’s lost; not coveted until it’s been taken away, isn’t even considered because it doesn’t have to be. It’s like breathing. One doesn’t think about taking a breath and then exert the effort to do so. It just happens, it just is – until it isn’t. And then, suddenly, it becomes the most important thing in the world.

Growing up adopted, claiming a heritage has never been a rote exercise for me. It has always been a surgical, copy and paste exertion. The experience of feeling simultaneously grounded in history and existing in the present has always evaded me, despite all the mental gymnastics I’ve attempted to make it otherwise."

7. And speaking of (non)origins, a five-star site from New South Wales, Australia a Parlimentary Inquiry into Adoption Practices. It explores topics known all too well by adoptees and natural mothers who gave their babies up, including Pathological grief, Personality Damage associated with defenses, Personality damage associated with the isoloation of the birth experience and loss of the baby, Post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, etc. Good, hard-hitting stuff.

Tomorrow I'll talk about being unemployable, which I attribute at least in part to being an adoptee who hasn't worked out her shit yet.