• Halo on xbox
• A literal, tangible box full of games to get us through the Dark Months
• Warm weather during winter – warm enough to walk outside comfortably. Walks outside, even in the cold
• German chocolate
• Irish cream and maple whiskey
• Roscato (bubbly sweet red wine)
• Charcuterie boards
• Breakfast quesadillas w/ salsa, chips, hot sauce, saur cream, guacamole, cheese dip
• A bowl of pomegranate seeds – hail to the goddess of fertility and death
• Worcestershire sauce
• The sound my dad made when he walked past me by the door to the kitchen and noticed that I was listening to my partner’s heartbeat with one of his stethoscopes
• Stuffed peppers
• Library books
• Christmas lights
• Trinkets!!!!!
• Cinnamon roll coffee creamer in a mug of hot coffee in the morning
• The ability to reach out to any person you love who is inconveniently far away and talk to them when you miss them
• Spending time with family at the holidays
• Spoons
• Cat
• Edgar Allan Poe: The Ultimate Collection
• Mornings (also evenings) with my partner
• Jigsaw puzzles. Especially the one with the koi pond.
• Sudoku, crosswords, logic puzzles, anagrams, cryptograms, coloring books.
• The promise I made to my little sister that for as long as I am up and about and still breathing she will never run out of cooking oil or salt. This year I gave her glass bead mushroom earrings, bracelets, almond extract for baking, a scarf, a throw blanket, a lavender scented candle, slippers, and a glass liquid measuring cup. I spoil her more than I spoil most everyone else.
• Cowboy hats
• Chex mix, snickerdoodles, and frosted sugar cookies: the homemade holy trinity
• The pineapple we got my sister’s boyfriend for Christmas.
• He got her a bread maker. We are all about to enjoy the results.
• My sister’s stick and poke tattoos
• Christmas movies: Scrooge, It’s A Wonderful Life
• Winter break between semesters
• Blankets!!!
• A playlist of all our favorite songs from this year
• All the Christmas cards that I sent out, and all the cards that I got back (yours is on the way, if you haven’t received it already)
• We have always had a dining room table but now we finally have dining room chairs at the table. We’ll likely keep the piano bench for working on puzzles.
• Books
• Music library
• Philosophy & math
• Spooky podcasts
• True crime stories
• Murphy, who is goode
• Old family pictures.

In a saucepan with olive oil: a mirepoix of celery, onion, carrots garlic. Then slice up a potato and a roma tomato into the pan. You have to hold the vegetables in one hand over the saucepan and slice with a small knife the other – like that. Once the mirepoix is translucent or a little carmalized but Not Burnt, add a handful of uncooked brown rice and a smaller handful of dry lentils. Cover everything in vegetable broth and add a splash of vinegar. Add more salt than you think you need and some ground black pepper. Add a fuckton (unit of measurement) of spinach right at the end. Too much spinach. It’ll cook down. Drown everything in some kind of Italian spice mix.

This soup is really boring on its own, so you have to serve it with crackers. It’s also fun to add smoked gouda, parm romano, roasted sweet potato, and a garlic parm seasoning.

I’m trying to tell you something ’bout my life
Maybe give me insight between black and white
And the best thing you ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously
It’s only life after all.

Well, darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable
And lightness has a call that’s hard to hear
And I wrap my fear around me like a blanket
I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it
I’m crawling on your shores

And I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine
Closer I am to fine

And I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry or see a B-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind
Got my paper and I was free

And I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine
Closer I am to fine

I stopped by the bar at 3 A.M.
To seek solace in a bottle or possibly a friend
And I woke up with a headache like my head against a board
Twice as cloudy as I’d been the night before
And I went in seeking clarity

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
We go to the doctor, we go to the mountains
We look to the children, we drink from the fountain
Yeah, we go to the Bible, we go through the workout
We read up on revival, we stand up for the lookout

There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine

Closer I am to fine
Closer I am to fine

~ The Indigo Girls

“One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between the words or in the depth of what is unsayable between two people.”
John O’Donohue

“Taylor Swift is a poet who makes me feel utterly seen in my human experience, especially in my experience as a woman. Stay mad haters.”

~ Clementine Morrigan, @clementinemorrigan on IG, Dec. 20th 2023

she was not a lover,

not a warrior,

not a magician –

but a theif

a natural born theif

who invested in deep pockets, the pockets they don’t make for women’s clothes

a pirate with one leg

a raven

a crow

maybe even a swallow

collecting shiny things that caught her eye

to bring back home to the nest

that was already lined with the remnants of one cracked shell

but had never known the helpless cries or the warmth of a baby bird.

a moth

fluttering too close to the lamp

a moth

almost a mother

if the “er” had only been there

when she missed her carriage.

–

“I am no mother, I am no bride, I am King.”

~ Florence Welch

In no particular order, try:

• A brisk walk in the outdoors, maybe after dark in the snow on a clear night, or early morning. Look up.
• The smell of baking sugar cookies
• Peeling clementines.
• Broken concolor fir needles held close to the nose and examined
• Blowing out a beeswax candle and watching the smoke
• The sound of wood crackling on the nearest available hearth. Perhaps a woodstove.
• A string of Christmas lights, or that one specific kind of reindeer decorations
• A handwritten note to a loved one
• Chocolate covered almonds with coconut flakes and sea salt. Or chex mix baked in the oven
• Raw snicklerdoodle dough rolled in sugar and cinnamon
• Three big spoonfuls of honey, two cups of water, the juice from three lemons, and three shots of brandy in a saucepan until hot. Makes two full mugs.

Thank you.

The tiny dot of blue ink from the chemo port on his chest is a constant reminder to hold him a little more tightly, and not take a single moment of our life together for granted.

Merry Christmas.

Tenzin Chopak’s music is pure magic. Beyond a couple of live albums, you can’t find much of it on the streaming services; in order to aquire his music, you may actually have to go see him perform live (Naples or Geneva or Ithaca, usually) and buy his merchandise in person. I only ever see him live at Grassroots. He’s just made the tough decision to step away from being a caretaker of dementia patients in order to work on his music more of the time. The fundraiser for the next big project is open. Here is the Patreon.

Oh, and he’s also a fairly excellent wildlife photographer. The dark fairy prince man with the guitar and his piano magician buddy have my whole entire heart.

(Steve Rogers can share.)

Tenzin’s Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/fragile-legacy-94943507?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link&fbclid=IwAR0Z6dooqbQZrY6UVmbO1kncZtFaCejOASQ5Zyu1YSDP5K71ASoZ9ssZg0s

If you happen to have old CDs sitting around to which you will no longer listen because you use other music listening platforms or streaming services, I would also love to borrow them or adopt them for you.

Especially if they’re from these artists:

Jewel
Hozier
Florence
Wild Rivers
The East Pointers
Mumford and Sons
Aoife O’Donovan
Sarah Jaroz
John Mayer
Taylor Swift
Chris Stapleton
Gregory Alan Iskov
Nickle Creek
Rising Appalachia
Tenzin Chopak
The Dead Tongues
The Horse Flies
Billy Strings
The Lil Smokies
KT Tunstall
Maggie Rogers
Taylor Ashton
LP
King Princess
Lake Street Dive
Susan Tedeschi
Eric Clapton
Keb Mo
Big Theif
Melissa Etheridge
Taylor Swift
KC Jones
Alison Krauss
Port Cities
Patty Griffin
Brandi Carlile
The Duhks
Bob Dylan
Chris Thile
Yo Yo Ma

I also take recommendations.

My entire IG account is mostly just hundreds of photos of album covers that I like.

If you happen to have, or know people who have books (by any of these authors) to which you are no longer attached, I would love to have them. I know some people are at a stage in their lives where they are trying to let go of some portion of their book collections, but I am still very much collecting. At some point more bookshelves may be in order. Or a bigger home with a room that is just a library. Preferably with a secret door hidden somewhere in amongst the shelves.

I am a simple creature who does not ask for much. Just,

in no particular order:

Edgar Allen Poe
John Muir
Tamsyn Muir
Mary Oliver
Maya Angelou
Neil Gaiman
Derek Parfit
Joseph Campbell
Carl Jung
William Blake
Robert Frost
Andrea Gibson
Terry Pratchett
Loren Eiseley
John Lewis
James Baldwin
Stephen King (The Dark Tower series, specifically)
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Theraeu
Wendell Berry
Douglas Adams
Aldo Leopold
Pablo Neruda
Rumi
Carl Sagan
Stephen Hawking
David Whyte

Dr. Seuss

Ursula K Le Guin

Madeline L’Engle
Amanda Palmer

I know that libraries exist for a reason, but also I’m kind of book dragon who wants to sleep surrounded by my ridiculous hoard of superfluous possessions.

Still open to recommendations, as always.

I feel like this Christmas tree farm would be a good place for a wedding.

I’m not wanting fancy things in particular. These are enough.

“It’s not the long, flowing dress that you’re in
Or the light coming off of your skin
The fragile heart you protected for so long
Or the mercy in your sense of right and wrong
It’s not your hands searching slow in the dark
Or your nails leaving love’s watermark
It’s not the way you talk me off the roof
Your questions like directions to the truth

It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
Or one day you’ll be gone

If we were vampires and death was a joke
We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke
And laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn’t feel the need to hold your hand
Maybe time running out is a gift
I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift
And give you every second I can find
And hope it isn’t me who’s left behind

It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
Or one day you’ll be gone

It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
One day you’ll be gone…”

~ Jason Isbell

“It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.

I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true

I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘Yes.’

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.

I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.”

Oriah – Mountain Dreamer – The Invitation

“Bans off our bodies.”

“Headin’ down south to the land of the pines
I’m thumbin’ my way into North Caroline
Starin’ up the road and pray to God I see headlights

I made it down the coast in seventeen hours
Pickin’ me a bouquet of dogwood flowers
And I’m a-hopin’ for Raleigh, I can see my baby tonight

So, rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama any way you feel
Hey… mama rock me
Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a southbound train
Hey… mama rock me

Runnin’ from the cold up in New England
I was born to be a fiddler in an old time string band
My baby plays a guitar, I pick a banjo now
Oh, north country winters keep a-gettin’ me down
Lost my money playin’ poker, so I had to leave town
But I ain’t a-turnin’ back to livin’ that old life no more

So, rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama any way you feel
Hey… mama rock me
Yeah, rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a southbound train
Hey… mama rock me

Walkin’ to the south out of Roanoke
I caught a trucker out of Philly, had a nice long toke
But he’s a-headin’ west from the Cumberland Gap
To Johnson City, Tennessee
And I gotta get a move on before the sun
I hear my baby callin’ my name and I know that she’s the only one
And if I died in Raleigh, at least I will die free

So, rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama any way you feel
Hey… mama rock me
Oh, rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a southbound train
Hey… mama rock me
So, rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama any way you feel (oh, I wanna feel)
Hey… mama rock me

Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a southbound train
Hey… mama rock me”

~ Bob Dylan

“Somethin’ happens when everybody finds out
See the vultures circling, dark clouds
Love’s a fragile little flame, it could burn out
It could burn out

‘Cause they got the cages, they got the boxes
And guns
They are the hunters, we are the foxes
And we run

Baby, I know places we won’t be found, and
They’ll be chasing their tails trying to track us down
‘Cause I, I know places we can hide
I know places
I know places

Lights flash and we’ll run for the fences
Let them say what they want, we won’t hear it
Loose lips sink ships all the damn time
Not this time

Just grab my hand and don’t ever drop it
My love
They are the hunters, we are the foxes
And we run

Baby, I know places we won’t be found, and
They’ll be chasing their tails trying to track us down
‘Cause I, I know places we can hide
I know places…”

~ Taylor Swift

“Build me up from bones, wrap me up in skin
Hold me close enough to breathe me in
The moon’s a fingernail
Scratching on the back of the night in which we lay beside

I held every inch of you
I wrote every line for you
I made time when time was all but gone
You’re the love I’ve always known

The night’s so dark and gray
But you’ve helped me find my way
Through the wild and wonders of this world
So take me with you now
‘Cause I need to show you how
I can love you better than before

I held every inch of you
I wrote every line for you
I made time when time was all but gone
You’re the love I’ve always known…

So, play it sweet and low
We’ve got nowhere to go
I am yours and you’re the love I know

I held every inch of you
I wrote every line for you
I made time when time was slow but gone
You’re the love I’ve always known…”

~ Sarah Jaroz

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with the sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort. The mind has sunk away into its beginnings among old roots and the obscure tricklings and movings that stir inanimate things. Like the charmed fairy circle into which man once stepped, and upon emergence learned that a whole century had passed in a single night, one can never quite define this secret; but it has something to do, I am quite sure, with common water. Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches past and present and future; it moves under the polls and wanders thinly in the heights of air. It can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snowflake.”

~ Loren C. Eiseley, “The Flow of the River.”

“The best way to overcome it [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.”

~ Bertrand Russell

“When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.

When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I also cared more about my inevitable death. After my death, there will be no one living who will be me. I can now redescribe this fact. Though there will later be many experiences, none of these experiences will be connected to my present experiences by chains of such direct connections as those involved in experience-memory, or in the carrying out of an earlier intention. Some of these future experiences may be related to my present experiences in less direct ways. There will later be some memories about my life. And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice. My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.”

~ Derek Parfit

“Fare thee well
My own true love
Farewell for a while
I’m going away
But I’ll be back
Though I go 10, 000 miles

10, 000 miles
My own true love
10, 000 miles or more
The rocks may melt
And the seas may burn
If I should not return

Oh don’t you see
That lonesome dove
Sitting on an ivy tree
She’s weeping for
Her own true love
As I shall weep for mine

Oh come ye back
My own true love
And stay a while with me
If I had a friend
All on this earth
You’ve been a friend to me”

~ Mary Chapin Carpenter, “10,000 miles”

“The sound of a bell
Still reverberating,
or a blackbird calling
from a corner of the field,
asking you to wake
into this life,
or inviting you deeper
into the one that waits.

Either way
takes courage,
either way wants you
to be nothing
but that self that
is no self at all,
wants you to walk
to the place
where you find
you already know
how to give
every last thing
away.

The approach
that is also
the meeting
itself,
without any
meeting
at all.

That radiance
you have always
carried with you
as you walk
both alone
and completely
accompanied
in friendship
by every corner
of the world
crying
Allelujah“

~ David Whyte

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring. A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken, can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence. A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed. But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges. A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward, ear cocked for geese.”

~ Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your bodylove what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your placein the family of things.”

~ Mary Oliver

“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

~ Wendell Berry

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

~ Robert Frost

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”

~ J.R.R. Tolkien

“It was many and many a year ago,

   In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

   By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

   Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love—

   I and my Annabel Lee—

With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven

   Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

   My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

   And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

   In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,

   Went envying her and me—

Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,

   In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

   Of those who were older than we—

   Of many far wiser than we—

And neither the angels in Heaven above

   Nor the demons down under the sea

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

   Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

   In her sepulchre there by the sea—

   In her tomb by the sounding sea.”

~ Edgar Allen Poe

“US vetoes UN resolution calling for Gaza ceasefire. The US was the only nation to vote against the Security Council resolution. Aid groups condemned the veto.”

~ CNN

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour”

~ William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate
To act her earthy and abhorr’d commands,
Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
By help of her more potent ministers,
And in her most unmitigable rage,
Into a cloven pine; within which rift
Imprison’d, thou didst painfully remain”

Shakespeare, The Tempest

Standing in mountain pose, “head over heart, heart over pelvis,” then hands up over my head, lean to the left, lean to the right, stretch, swan dive into a forward fold, halfway lift, back to mountain, dive into downward facing dog, upward facing dog, cat/cow, inhale/exhale, downward dog again, hop to the front of the mat, warrior I, warrior II, lean back for peaceful warrior, look up, lean forward for triangle, don’t lock the knees, don’t wobble, don’t fall, back to warrior II, warrior I, downward dog, same sequence on the other side, make my way to a seated position with legs folded, twist to the left, twist to the right, lean forward so forehead rests on the floor, same thing with the other leg folded in front, child’s pose, bridge pose, happy baby pose, corpse pose, then 75 crunches and 25 push-ups, twice, and 30 squats.

Every day, if possible.

The other day I “ran” on the elliptical for an hour at a 15 minute mile and I think it rewired my entire brain. Totally different set of neurotransmitters. Runner’s high felt lovely.

There’s a weightlifting circuit at the planet fitness 10 minutes from the apartment where I am training my muscularskeletal system to lift heavy things. A couple times a week. I am stronger than I was this summer.

Yesterday I went out for a walk around the apartment complex on my own and listened to music and the cold air stung my recovering lungs and there was a lot of coughing, and my socks were uncomfortably wet and cold, but I felt better after.

“You got to leave me now, you got to go alone
You got to chase a dream, one that’s all your own
Before it slips away
When you’re flyin’ high, take my heart along
I’ll be the harmony to every lonely song
That you learn to play

When you’re soarin’ through the air
I’ll be your solid ground
Take every chance you dare
I’ll still be there
When you come back down
When you come back down

I’ll keep lookin’ up, waitin’ your return
My greatest fear will be that you will crash and burn
And I won’t feel your fire
I’ll be the other hand that always holds the line
Connectin’ in between your sweet heart and mine
I’m strung out on that wire

And I’ll be on the other end, to hear you when you call
Angel, you were born to fly, and if you get too high
I’ll catch you when you fall
I’ll catch you when you fall

Your memory’s the sunshine every new day brings
I know the sky is calling
Angel, let me help you with your wings

When you’re soarin’ through the air
I’ll be your solid ground
Take every chance you dare

I’ll still be there
When you come back down
Take every chance you dare,
I’ll still be there
When you come back down
When you come back down”

~ Nickle Creek, “When you come back down,” Nickle Creek. Sugar Hill Records, A Welk Music Group Company. 2006.

“Find yourself another place to fall

Find yourself up against another brick wall

See yourself as a fallen angel

Well I don’t see no holes in the roof but you find yourself another place to fall…”

– K.T. Tunstall, “Another Place to Fall,” Eyes to the Telescope. Universal Music Operations Limited. 2005.

“Oh captain, my captain…”

The other night I woke up in a cold sweat and remembered that I haven’t seen my favorite button down shirt in months – possibly since last summer – and with all of the busyness of life it’s taken me this long to realize it’s gone. So this morning I took apart the apartment trying to find it – unsuccessfully. I got that shirt the weekend I stayed with my sister and went on adventures with the hillbilly rednecks she lives with in the trailer park. That was the weekend everyone thought I was in the psych ward but I wasn’t. I loved that shirt. Its loss was a devastating thing.

So today I went for a joy ride. I took Rt. 33 west over to Bergen and turned north on Rt. 19 over the railroad tracks, droveober the top of the hill into Brockport, found the plaza with the outlet where I first acquired the favorite shirt a little less than a year ago. I found the same shirt, it was the only one left on the rack, acquired the shirt, drove home. The drive is vaguely wet and grey and brown and quietly pleasant. Nice to get out of the house after being sick. Listened to Scott Regan on Different Radio, WRUR 88.5 FM – found some good music, it sounds like there’s going to be some live music at the Little Theater in Rochester again. He says Sarah Jaroz released a new album recently, must listen.

Went to the gym and got groceries with Steve Rogers. After dinner we put a comforter and some couch cushions down on the living room floor and played Halo for a couple of hours. I am still not very good at this game. I die and come back to life with embarrassing frequently, but at least I shot and killed a bunch of gnarley looking bad guys. My partner is being really excellent about being patient with me while I learn how to do this thing, and both of us are having fun.

This is all for now.

Last night we watched the first half of a movie and then drove through the pitch darkness and the pouring rain to procure a small black raspberry milkshake from a drive thru around the corner. Because I was really craving a milkshake. We blasted a song by Bastile through the speakers on the way home and then hid under the same umbrella on the short walk from the parking lot to door to the apartment building. And then we were home, in our lovely cozy little space – with our books and our piano and our christmas tree and our fairy lights and our cat and our comfy blankets on the couch. It feels like something out of an illustrated children’s book.

I am so happy.

Took a bath today.

Turned on the shower and let the room fill up with steam. Tried to just breathe. Made myself drink bottled water from the fridge. Water ran hot – not too hot, because that becomes unhelpful.

I think I’ve been suffering from dehydration which is slowing my recovery from the the upper respiratory infection. I’m going to try to see if I can find myself some broth, next. For now – just moisturize everything and sleep.

Last night I woke up with difficulty breathing. This hasn’t happened since I was a little kid.

I sit up, go to the bathroom sink, cough up half a lung in fascinating colors, drink some water, throw the water up in the sink because the cough triggers the gag reflex, tilt my head back to stop the nosebleed that’s started when I try to blow my nose because my sinuses are dry and hasn’t stopped in three days. I cannot hear properly out of either of my ears and the resulting vertigo is distressing.

During the day I finally have enough energy to get up and wash the sheets and blankets on the bed. I listen to Florence and the Machine and sleep on the couch instead.

In the evenings my partner and I are cuddled together under blankets on the couch, watching TV shows about true crime. I tell him we should watch something less spooky, tomorrow.

If your ears are working fine with no pain and no inflammation, and if your nose is not congested, if your throat isn’t sore, if you aren’t nauseous, if your belly feels fine, if your hearing is not muffled, if you do not have a fever, if the backs of your hands are not dry and cracked – enjoy the feeling of being healthy. I take too much for granted, I think.

Lemon tea with honey, cold medicine, acetaminophen, antihistamine, water, hot soup, and rest.

“This is going to taste awful,” he says, liquid cold medicine in hand. “But it might make your throat feel better if you can get it down.”

I take a sniff.

“I’m supposed to drink this?”

“Yes.”

“All of this.”

“That’s right.”

“Whatever you say, doc.”

It does smell awful – potently medicinal. Upon further inspection, it tastes awful, too. I take a shot of liquid cold medicine and pause.

“Was I supposed to drink that on an empty stomach?” I ask.

In my current state I cannot accurately recount this story without using the phrase “his brow furrowed,” I am tired and it’s necessary for the plot.

His brow furrowed.

“I think it should be fine. I mean, I can usually – “

I am no longer listening.

About five minutes later my body has thoroughly rejected this attempt to poison me with cold syrup. I sleep for about four more hours.

Happy Thanksgiving.

This week, Rosalynn Carter died at the age of 96. A vehicle exploded on the Rainbow Bridge near Niagra Falls at the border between the US and Canada. There’s been frost on car windows for days.

At home, the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade is on in the background this morning while we make food to share with family later. Now there’s a Hallmark Christmas movie (with the exact same plot as every other Hallmark Christmas movie ever made) playing in the background while we get cleaned up and ready to drive.

Made stuffing with red onion, celery, mushrooms, dried cranberries, walnuts, and a spice mix with rosemary/sage/parsley/thyme. Also made sweet potatoes with a butter and brown sugar glaze seasoned with cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon, vanilla, salt. Bringing along some figs and brie and a milk stout to share also.

My ancestors would be so impressed with my spice collection.

Set up a small but living Christmas tree, complete with favorite ornaments and colorful Christmas lights and a tree skirt decorated with a woodland scene. There are strings of white fairy lights all around the apartment.

I think maybe I “need a little Christmas.”

I’m drinking coffee and trying to decide what to wear. I think the safest thing is to stick with something understated and cozy.

Feeling nervous about being around family during the holidays – sometimes this is a stressful and anxious and uncomfortable time. There is as much potential for conflict and upset as there is room for welcome and enjoyment of one another’s company. I think this is true for most families. Holidays tend to bring a certain set of higher expectations, attachment to outcome, a desire for everything to be perfect. When things aren’t exactly perfect, disappointment leeches a sour and poisonous vibe into the emotional atmosphere – and then old grudges might bubble to the surface, and then and then and then and then. It makes me feel tired and sad. So I’m feeling wary about that potential outcome, even though I really do hope that everything is lovely and fine. Because I love them, of course I love them. All of them. And I miss them so much.

I’m bringing a book and also Steve Rogers, who is the reason it was easy for me to move away from home when I thought that was the one thing in the universe I was never going to be strong enough to do.

I should have watched V for Vendetta years ago

Here’s another paper that I wrote for a political science course. Whereas my previous paper focuses primarily on solutions to the problem of genocide, this paper focuses more on the roots or causes. I wrote this because it is easier to remedy a problem when you understand what the fuck is going on and why. Like in medicine. Thanks for reading.

Genocide represents the very worst of what humans are capable of doing to each other.[1] It is tempting to imagine perpetrators of genocide as psychologically abnormal, as inhuman monsters. When Hannah Arendt observed the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, she encountered not the monster she expected but a normal man.[2] Christopher Browning made a similar observation about Polish Reserve Battalion 101, which lead him to ask, “If the men of the Reserve Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?”[3] It is comforting to think that if genocide were to happen outside our own front doors, we would not participate in the evil going on around us. This might not be true. The Jewish Holocaust happened in a society much like our own, and that atrocity was accomplished through the coordinated efforts of thousands. To understand why so many people participated, we should shift our focus from “why did the Germans kill the Jews” to “why did the individual German participate in the massacre.”[JBG1] ^[4] The psychological experiments of Stanley Milgram and Philip G. Zimbardo demonstrate that ordinary people are more than capable of doing terrible things to each other in the right circumstances, but a more nuanced look at their results might lead us to a conclusion which is less deterministic. We can better understand why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust by acknowledging that the Nazis were not monsters, but ordinary people, and examining what factors bring out that behavior in an ordinary person in psychological studies and in the context of the Holocaust.[JBG2] 

The pseudoscientific premise of eugenics is that it is to improve the human race by removing carriers of defective genes from the gene pool. At issue is what constitutes a defective gene. Out of sheer collective narcissism, people of European descent thought of other races as naturally inferior, and wanted to prevent “contamination of their bloodline” with genes from other racial groups, also the physically or psychologically disabled, homosexuals, alcoholics, delinquents, etc..

Also at issue is how far we ought to be willing to go for the sake of “improving the human race.” Eugenics is most dangerous combined with the philosophy that “the end justifies the means,” the rationalization of necessary evil for the sake of the greater good. In the United States, from which Germany learned many things, “racial hygiene” was enforced through public policy and medical practices like segregation, limits on immigration for certain groups, stigmatization of inter-racial marriage, forced sterilization, etc. Under post-WWI Germany’s “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Disabled Offspring,” the Aktion T-4 program was created to euthanize infants and children with disabilities.[5] The program was later expanded to children up to seventeen years old. They were a “burden on society,” and their lives were not considered worth living. Children were taken away and killed without parents’ consent. When the public found out, moral outrage ensued, and the program was allegedly shut down. Six killing institutions for disabled adults continued until the end of WWII. Technology used for the euthanasia program was later used in killing camps.

That “end justifies the means” logic requires ignoring the sacredness of the things we find it necessary to violate. We might comfort ourselves with notions like “some lives add more value to this world than others,” or that “there may be a point past which life is no longer worth living.” Allowing one’s conscience to be guided by preconceived notions without paying attention to the details of real life is irresponsible, but that irresponsibility is entirely predictable.

Speaking of overreliance on preconceived notions to justify violation of the sacred for the sake of the greater good, the Holocaust could not have happened without the old and pervasive tradition of anti-Semitism in Europe. Slight, arbitrary differences in outward appearance between Jews and other Germans were only the beginning. Differences in religious and cultural practices, ethnic history, folklore, socio-economic status became the basis for potent stereotypes. Because of theological differences with Christianity, Jews were allegedly blamed for the death of Jesus. A long history of persecution, as well as a rich doctrine of cultural practices which set them apart, meant that Jews tended to live together in separate communities. Jewish financial practices helped them emerge as outstanding in the financial sector, and when states were in economic turmoil after much expensive war-making, blaming the folks who managed the banks was much easier than repaying their debts. Karl Marx had Jewish ancestry, which allowed Nazis to connect the Jews to the Bolshevik threat. The Jewish identity knew no borders, and the existence of such an identity group within a war-torn Germany was seen as a threat to popular loyalty to the state.

Adolf Hitler was an eloquent populist who blamed Jews for the loss of WWI and promised to “make Germany great again.”[6] He combined ancient anti-Semitism with new eugenics pseudoscience and called for the “purification of the German race.” Jones writes that Hitler once told a journalist, “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews.”[7]

Anti-Semitic propaganda like Mein Kampf at once preyed on and worsened existential fear in Germany. Wherever there is uncertainty and turmoil, shaken people find solace in belonging to a group. Identity groups are defined in terms of who doesn’t belong, and insecurity strengthens wariness or indifference towards outsiders.[8] We “assuage our fear of death through the death of the other.” Hitler’s conviction that Germany would be better off without Jews swayed Germans because prejudice towards outsiders was heightened, and the promise of a better world for their families was comforting. Jews were outside of the in-group identity that was German loyalty to the state.

Nationalism was rampant, fueled by Hitler’s rhetoric and the third Reich’s anti-Semitic propaganda campaign. More Germans voted liberal in their semblance of a democratic system, but the socialists were so busy fighting the communists that the left lost an election to the Nazis. After the Nazis took control of the government, public policy quickly became blatantly anti-Semitic. The Nuremburg laws stripped Jews of their citizenship; they couldn’t vote or hold public office. The “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor” made eugenics and “racial hygiene” into public policy. Intermarriage or partnerships between Jews and other Germans was forbidden. “Any action could be taken to enforce these laws.” Many Jews were sterilized.

As Germany expanded in WWII, so did their Jewish population. Germany relocated Jews to hundreds of ghetto communities, but the sheer numbers of people made relocation to livable conditions difficult. Bureaucrats managing refugees protested, “we’ve got too many of these people, don’t send any more!” and “how long do we have to live with this?”[9] Nazis considered exploiting Jews for labor, but many were unfit to work.

A direct order to exterminate all Jews was never given.[10] At the Bonzi Conference, high-ranking Nazi officials settled the “Final Solution” to the problem of what to do with these people, a problem which the Germans entirely created for themselves. Letting the Jews go, allowing them to live freely in Germany, may not even have crossed their thoroughly indoctrinated minds. After the abuse Jews had already suffered and witnessed, and with the popularity of Nazi ideology in full swing, the risk of catastrophe was high. But it would have been a catastrophe either way.

Killing millions efficiently required progressively refining methodologies. Einstatzgruppen rounded up, massacred, and buried the Jews in mass graves, but routinely shooting thousands of people point blank took a toll on firing squads. Gas vans and gas chambers distanced perpetrators from victims. In the camps, those not sent to the gas chambers were exploited for their labor, worked to death under abysmal conditions. Some were forced to dispose of the bodies of other victims.

Among the Nazis, there were a few sociopathic monsters who joined up purely for the fascination of inflicting pain on others. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz, helped select which people should go to the gas chambers when they arrived.[11] He performed experiments on twins, “without anesthesia and without their consent.”[12]

For most people, it is “difficult to look another human being in the eye and kill or torture them.” To bypass social inhibitions, Nazis thought of Jews as only seeming human, not “human on the inside, where it matters.”[13] One holocaust survivor recounted being forced to dig up mass graves, and being forbidden to refer to the dead as human.[14] A German doctor who refused to experiment on Jews was asked by a colleague, “How can you look at them and see someone who is like you?” to which she replied, “there are many people who are not like me, especially you.”

Something happens when one group is given complete dominance over people they are conditioned to see as inferior, sinister, different, alien, or wrong which may help us understand how ordinary people can do these things to each other. Philip G. Zimbardo studied the social behavior of Stanford college students in a simulated prison environment. Students were arbitrarily assigned the role of “guards” who had authority and responsibility to keep “prisoners” in line, enforcing rules designed by the experimenters to dehumanize prisoners. The resulting brutality of the guards towards the prisoners was so severe that the experimenters stopped the study prematurely.[15] As Wilson says, “If you give a person power over someone else who is powerless, someone who has been demonized or made to seem less human, then that absolute power corrupts absolutely.”[16] The blatant anti-Semitism of Hitler’s propaganda, rhetoric, and policy demonized the Jews and made them seem less human. Giving Nazis absolute power over the Jews created a permissive environment for unspeakable atrocities to take place.

With backwards logic, some guards blamed the prisoners for their own abuse. i.e., “if you weren’t breaking the rules, I wouldn’t have to keep you in line. I don’t want to do this. It’s your fault that I have to do these things to you.”[17] Blame creates desire for retribution, which makes it easier to justify abuse.

The question of how Nazis got their power over the Jews is difficult. The narrative that the victims went “meekly to their deaths”[18] is too simple. Aside from notable resistance[19] and uprisings, consider what it must have been like from their perspectives. The shock of being taken from one’s home and community and everyday life, the fear and denial and dread of getting off a train in an unfamiliar place and being separated from families and not knowing what was happening or why, disorientation and exhaustion of living and sleeping in poor conditions without adequate sustenance.[20] It was brutal. In Prague, there is a museum at the old synagogue, and on display they have children’s drawings which were salvaged from the ghettos and carefully preserved.[21] That there were people trying to go on with the everyday business of giving the kids something to do, in conditions like this, is in itself a profound kind of resistance.

Still, there is the problem of the Judenrate, the Jewish councils whose job it was to ensure that Nazi orders were carried out in the ghettos.[22] They helped round up and select which people should go to the camps, distributed rations, and enforced rules. Purely from a logistical perspective, their assistance helped make the coordinated mass killing possible. If they had somehow refused to cooperate, it might have slowed the process down. They were choosing the lesser of two evils: dying and subjecting other victims to the whims of the Nazis, or living and at maintaining a small amount of power over the treatment of innocent people, at least for a while. Alternatively, they might have enjoyed having power for power’s sake, or perhaps they were obeying authority because they felt they had no other choice.

One unsettling possibility is that ordinary people – victims and perpetrators alike, although the line between those two things isn’t always clear – participated in the Holocaust because they were “just doing their jobs” and failed to stand up to authority. Milgram’s experiments tested the limits of human obedience when we are told to harm another person. On the false pretense of studying the relationship between punishment and learning, subjects were told to shock a stranger with increasingly strong jolts from a generator when he made mistakes. The majority “obeyed the orders of the experimenter to the end, proceeding to punish the victim until they reached the most potent shock on the generator.”[23] Ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust because of a psychological tendency to defer to authority, even when that authority is wrong. Those who opposed the Nazi régime were vulnerable to being executed or sent to concentration camps, so this tendency not to question authority was likely compounded by fear.[24] This might help explain the sheer number of people who were involved with the coordinated annihilation of a group, who didn’t stand up and say, “I refuse to do this, this is wrong.”

In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen chastised Christopher Browning for portraying Holocaust perpetrators as devoid of individual agency, helplessly swept along by circumstance. It is harder to hold people accountable when we don’t acknowledge the role of their own agency in their behavior. Goldhagen focused on the image of Nazis as ideological zealots motivated by bigotry and hate and blood-lust. His “famous answer to ‘why did the Germans kill the Jews’ was ‘because they wanted to.’”[25] To his point, members of Reserve Battalion 101 in Poland were allegedly free to stop the killing and go home whenever they wished. Most of them chose to stay.

To some extent, indoctrination is a matter of circumstance. The Nazis were not born, they were made. Through experience, through exposure to ideological perspectives through parents, classmates, teachers, friends. Through books, food, and tradition, through conversations and stories and lyrics of songs. Through the state of the word they were living in. Everything that happens to a person from that first gasp of air and light and cold to the moment when she finds herself staring down the barrel of a gun at a mother holding a child at the edge of a ditch, or carefully writing down a list of names, or selling dark hair and small shoes and gold teeth to the highest bidder. Everything that has ever happened in her life has made her what she is.

In the Stanford Prison Experiment, some of the guards were kinder to the prisoners than others. A significant minority of Milgram’s subjects were given the chance to harm innocent people and chose not to. Subjects cheated and administered lower shocks when the experimenter wasn’t looking, and if even one other person in the room refused to cooperate, others were more likely to follow. When one Milgram subject was told that he had “no other choice” but to continue, he replied, “excuse me, but I do have a choice. I’ve probably gone too far already.”[26] It’s no coincidence that this man worked as an electrical engineer, and knew what it felt like like to be shocked at a high voltage.

The circumstances which turned some people into monsters brought out the best in others. We know there were ordinary people who protected the Jews,[27] who gave them money or food or somewhere to hide or the necessary paperwork and a safe path to safety. Would-be accomplices refused to cooperate when they realized what they were being asked to do. Even within the ranks of the perpetrators, there were those who tried to help victims wherever they could. Afterwards, many said things like, “I did what anyone would have done,” or “I didn’t have a choice,” or “they would have done the same for me.”[28] The characteristics which set this kind of person apart, or perhaps makes them truly extraordinary are: a “universal sense of the altruistic bond,” a keen sense of their own autonomy, and often had a[29] personal acquaintance with some of the people who are being targeted.

In hindsight, it is possible to pick out the large-scale political, economic, and social forces which culminated in the genocide, but explanations for these forces are best understood in terms of each of the people who were making all of the small, individual decisions working in tandem. The massive coordinated effort to destroy the Jews could not have happened without the participation of thousands of devastatingly ordinary people – and the same can be said of the resistance which did everything from saving lives to making a few moments of the life of a child living in a ghetto a little more easy to bear.

Given the catastrophic evil that happened in spite of that resistance, we might think that there is good in this world, it’s just that this time it wasn’t enough. But tell that to the innocent person who survived because there was somebody there who was willing to help him. As Loren Eiseley once wrote, “it made a difference to that one.” Imagine for a second what this world would be like, if what goodness we’ve got wasn’t here.

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Baum, Stephen K. Psychology of Genocide: Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Rescuers.

Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: The Reserve Police Battalion 101.

Browning, Christopher. “The Nazi Empire,” The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies.

Dudai, Ron. “Understanding perpetrators in genocides and mass atrocities.”

Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl.

Goldhagen, David. Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

Jones, Adam. Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction.

Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah.

Milgram, Stanley. “Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.”

Pierson, Frank. Conspiracy.

Paxton, George. Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis.

Waller, James. Becoming Evil.

Zimbardo, Phillip G. “The Stanford Prison Experiment: A Simulation of the Psychology of Imprisonment.”

---

[1] Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction

[2] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

[3] Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

[4] Ron Dudai, Understanding Perpetrators of Genocide and Mass Killing

[5] Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction

[6] 45^th president of the United States

[7] Jones, Genocide. pg. 247

[8] Stephen K. Baum, Psychology of Genocide

[9] Conspiracy.

[10] Jones, Genocide

[11] Marcus Parks,

[12] Personal notes taken at Auschwitz I Museum

[13] David Livingstone Smith, “On Dehumanization,” Unmuted. Transcripts of interviews by Myisha Cherry.

[14] Shoah.

[15] Zimbardo, “Stanford Prison Experiment”

[16] David Wilson as quoted by Jones in Genocide, 402

[17] Jones, Genocide.

[18] Jones, Genocide.

[19] George Paxton, Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis

[20] Eli Wiesel, Night.

[21] Personal notes on visit to The “Old Synagogue” in Prague, Czech Republic

[22] Jones, Genocide.

[23] Jones, Genocide.

[24] George Paxton, Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis

[25] Dudai, “Understanding perpetrators.”

[26] Jones, Genocide, 400

[27] George Paxton, Resistance to Genocide

[28] Stephen K. Baum, Psychology of Genocide

[29] Baum, Psychology. See also Diary of Anne Frank.

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 [JBG1]Excellent

 [JBG2]Superb introduction!

I wrote this paper years ago for a philosophy course on nonviolence. One of the assignments in that course was to develop a strategy to remedy a specific kind of contemporary violence. I feel like this paper is relevent to current events. I don’t know if the strategies put forth in this paper are enough to change the course of history, but at least it’s a place to begin.

Sorry about the formatting, especially the bib. Consider this a rough draft.

I visited Auschwitz once. Roughly eighty years after most of it was reduced to rubble, I could still smell the ashes.

A project of the scale and complexity of genocide can’t happen without the participation of many people working together.[1] It is so easy to think of the perpetrators of genocide as evil, psychologically abnormal, inhuman. But the unsettling reality is that genocides tend to be carried out, not by monsters, but by ordinary people.[2] As I left the concentration camps, I was thinking about each person who didn’t speak up and say, “I refuse to do this, this is wrong.” I haven’t stopped thinking about them since, and it’s been about two years. I can’t shake the feeling that, under the right circumstances, this could happen anywhere – I could find myself participating in unspeakable atrocity, and so could everyone else that I know.[3] I want to believe we could find a way to resist, if we needed to. Since I have also walked in cities which the Allied powers bombed into the ground, and there were children in those cities, and I don’t care whose children they were: I want to find a way to resist the worst of humanity in a way that doesn’t bring out the worst in ourselves.

In this paper, I will go to the roots of why genocide happens and explore patterns in human behavior which may help explain why ordinary people participate in genocide. I will develop ways to interrupt those patterns by nonviolent means. Nonviolent methods of resistance can help to counter indoctrination into genocidal ideologies, especially when it comes to fortifying communities and changing the way we respond to genocidal rhetoric and discourse.

In texts about Just War Theory and the strategic usefulness of nonviolence, genocide is a classic example of when arguing for a nonviolent solution seems futile. If violence is ever justified, it seems as though violence is justified for the sake of preventing or stopping a genocide. Gandhi challenged the notion that “the ends justify the means,” because just as an acorn will grow into an oak tree every time, violent means are likely to produce a violent outcome.[4] One of the five conditions of Just War Theory is that war is only justified if we have first exhausted the non-violent alternatives. I tend to believe that it’s rare that we have truly exhausted the peaceful alternatives, because I think there is usually an alternative path forward, if only we take a moment to look. Precisely because nonviolence is so often dismissed as not being useful in this instance, I think it’s worth taking the time to think about it more carefully.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about the idea that in order to effectively use nonviolence to push back against the things which are unjust, it is first necessary to spend time learning about them.[5] Understanding a little bit about the roots of genocide, particularly the individual capacity to help perpetrate genocide, gives me a framework for thinking about how to go about creating effective resistance.

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as … [certain] actions undertaken “with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a racial, ethnic, national or religious group.” Genocide is an indiscriminate attempt to annihilate a group of people – usually noncombatants – based on their identity, based on who they are.

Gan discussed the old and pervasive myth that there are “good guys and bad guys” in this world. The belief that a group of people is irredeemably bad or incapable of goodness is harmful because it allows us to justify using violence against them.

David Livingstone Smith said that it is “very difficult to look another human being in the eye and kill or torture them.”[6] It’s also nigh on impossible to look into the face of another human being and not recognize them as being one of us. Since it is often advantageous to violate and destroy other people, we’ve developed a cognitive mechanism for overriding that inhibition: we think of the “other” as “appearing to be human, but not really being human on the inside where it matters.”[7] Dehumanization is “closely related to the commission of … atrocities which would be difficult to commit unless we thought of the victims as less than human.”[8]

On a similar vein, Nussbaum writes about anger – the retributive instinct which accompanies a perceived injury against ourselves. During tumultuous times, we go looking for someone to blame for the problems of the world. With that blame, the impulse to get payback, the attitude that “it-doesn’t-matter-if-they-get-hurt-because-they-have-hurt-me,” also becomes a dangerous mechanism for decreasing inhibitions against violence, for increasing indifference to the suffering of a group.

Genocides consistently happen in places where it feels like the world is falling apart, when people are shaken and scared and insecure. Shaken and insecure people find solace in belonging to an identity group. Especially when we’re afraid, our “universe of moral obligation” is confined to the people we’re closest to, the people with whom we most identify. When times are bad, we take care of our own. The problem is that identity groups are defined in terms of who doesn’t belong. Existential dread increases wariness towards outsiders, intolerance of differences. In times of upheaval and turmoil, we turn inwards towards the warmth of what is familiar, wary of unknowns outside in the cold. We “assuage our own fear of death through the death of the other.” Indifference towards the suffering of people who are outside of our in-groups is heightened when we are afraid.

Humans are vulnerable to the sort of rhetoric, discourse, and propaganda which portrays other people as being to blame for the problems of the world, or incapable of goodness, or somehow less than human.[9] Anyone who is interested in inciting violence, in getting people to bypass their inhibitions against violence, depends on that vulnerability. And there will always be people out there who are interested in taking advantage of that human capacity to look into the eyes of another person and, somehow, justify destroying them.

Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic propaganda resonated with an old tradition of demonizing Jews in Europe. In Rwanda, a Hutu newspaper and radio station fueled an ideology of prejudice and hatred against the Tutsis – or “cockroaches,” as they were called. Facebook helped spread propaganda which demonized the Rohingya people in Myanmar. It only took a few weeks of non-stop news coverage of planes flying into the towers for the murders of Muslims in the U.S. to exceed the death toll of the attack on the world trade center in 2001.

One way to counter genocidal ideology is to try to stop it from spreading: to find the loudest voices in genocidal discourse and work to stop the flow of ideas from the source. Philip Gourevitch speculated that bombing the Hutu power radio station in Rwanda might have slowed the genocide. Who knows how many lives this could have saved.

One of Gene Sharp’s “pillars” which upholds the spread of this kind of ideology is the discourse and rhetoric in the media, as well as social media platforms. Bad news sells advertising. News media both thrives on and exacerbates public existential dread. It’s in the interest of for-profit news media to draw our attention to the worst things that are happening, all the time – even if that means becoming a platform for dehumanizing propaganda targeting a particular group. Decent public access to information may conflict with the best interests of the mediums which provide that service.

Online spaces create epistemic “bubbles” or “echo chambers” where ideologies are shared and reinforced. In a sense, each one of us is carrying around a printing press in our pockets, and each one of us is a radio tower – rebroadcasting the things we’ve heard, amplifying perspectives, constantly sharing the thoughts of strangers with everyone we know. Instead of having to travel to meet people who have also bought into eliminationist rhetoric, it’s possible to connect with people from halfway across the world.

Perhaps we ought to boycott mediums which make money off of existential dread, especially if they’re providing a platform for propaganda which dehumanizes specific groups of people. Doom scrolling on social media or constantly watching the news is such an ingrained part of the lives of so many that I think asking people to stop might be impractical, because engaging with the world like this is like an addiction for many people. Coordinating large numbers of people who log off for short periods of time, perhaps on a routine basis, could make a noticeable dent in the analytics at social media headquarters. This might help people who feel the same way about this issue realize that they’re not alone. It may become a starting point for conversations challenging the messages of bigotry and hate.

Even if we do somehow manage to change the nature of the platforms where this discourse is so often exchanged and shared, I’m hesitant to say that this will successfully stop the spread of genocidal discourse. The relationship between public information and the internet and news media “wasn’t always like this. Not very long ago, just before your time/right before the towers fell, circa ’99,”[10] the mediums that we used to share ideas with one another were different – but variations on these same ideas, in one form or another, have been being exchanged for millennium. The “myth of good guys and bad guys” is old and pervasive, and maybe it has always existed.

I’m at the epistemic disadvantage of being approximately the same age as the internet, as it exists today, and much of my connection to current events in my adult life – beyond my immediate surroundings – has happened through the lens of a small rectangle of blue light that fits into the palm of my hand. People have been engaging with genocidal ideology through other mediums for millennium. So “get off your phone and go lay in the grass and talk to a real person” may not be the revolutionary breakthrough that I want it to be.

This practice might be more useful at the individual level – taking time away from engaging with that feeling of existential dread is useful. We can focus that time and energy and attention on other things which are tremendously important. Also, sometimes current events are so awful that “it can be damaging even to look.” I believe that our minds were not built to hold an awareness of the suffering of billions from all over the world all at the same time, but we now have the technology which allows us to do this. I am not suggesting that we turn our backs on the problems of the world. But when we engage, I think we ought to hold onto perspective with everything we’ve got. Do this carefully. We are of no use to anyone if we’re overwhelmed with despair, and we are perhaps more vulnerable to being indoctrinated with genocidal ideologies if we’re full of existential dread. In order to fortify ourselves against indoctrination into genocidal ideology, we need to learn how to take what we hear on these platforms with a grain of salt.

In the long run, trying to mediate the spread of ideas is too much like putting a band-aid on an old and festering wound. At the heart of this issue, there is something uncomfortably human that needs to be dealt with. The problem is not just that genocidal discourse is out there, it’s that humans are uncomfortably susceptible to this kind of ideology. While we may focus on restricting circulation of this kind of discourse, effective strategy ultimately comes down to how we respond to the ideology when it comes across our path.

It’s difficult to learn how to recognize our own preconceived notions and ideologies from the inside. In order to recognize hatred and intolerance and prejudice for what it is, we have to understand what it looks like.[11] Teaching this skill in public school and college curriculum is frustratingly contentious. However, school curriculum represents only a tiny fraction of all of the possible ways to communicate ideas. Books, poetry, music, art, graffiti, theatre, film – everything from allegory to satire to masterful subtlety – these are some of the best “methods of persuasion” we’ve got, to help put beliefs in the context of a better understanding of the world.

Sometimes it is easier to learn about this for the first time in a context that is less personal, less close to home. That way, the first time we go looking for darkness in the places we least want to find it, we already know what we’re looking for. Learn about the Nazis, first, so that when we learn about the U.S.’s prison industrial complex or read about what’s happening on the border with Mexico, we can recognize something hauntingly familiar.

I have also found that works of fiction are excellent vehicles for communicating about things that are difficult to face in the context of real life. Good storytellers are some of the best teachers, because it is the work of a storyteller to notice the world as hard as possible and then come back and tell everyone else what they see.[12] A well-told story can orient a moral compass just about as well as anything that happens in real life. This works well for children, but once in a while I stumble on grown-ups who also enjoy reading made-up stories.

Perhaps I have strayed too far into the realm of books and internet spaces, and have wound up too far away from the real world.

People are much more vulnerable to taking genocidal ideology seriously when they are frightened and insecure and tired, and we are much more likely to be in that state when it feels like the world is falling apart around us. If it feels like the world is falling apart because it actually is falling apart, as it often seems to be, then it makes sense to try to hold the world together with everything we’ve got. This is a lot to ask for, because this world seems so unfathomably broken. Just speaking for myself, I often feel powerless in the face of that brokenness. And I tend to think that in spite of the best efforts of many good people, there will be times when trying to hold the world together isn’t going to work. For the sake of the times when there’s a chance that it could work, I think it’s worth thinking about how to hold the world together when it’s falling apart.

Gandhi stressed the importance of self-reliance for comprehensive nonviolent resistance. The Stanford Prison Experiments demonstrated that “if you give a person power over someone else who is powerless, someone who has been demonized or made to seem less human, then that absolute power corrupts absolutely”[13] Relying on a broken system for support gives that system power, puts us at the mercy of bad circumstances and instability and insecurity. This at once makes us more vulnerable to being dehumanized and also dehumanizing others. Having that independence, having practices for supporting ourselves which don’t rely so heavily on those systems, returns some of that power to communities.

At the grassroots level, a more secure world involves having networks of people who are up to the task of taking care of each other, even when times are bad. When larger systems are failing to take care of people, mutual aid networks allow communities to take care of one another. Basic fluency in the skills necessary to support each other is useful for not feeling powerless in the face of a world that feels like it’s falling apart.

            Across the board, people who’ve gone out of their way to stand up to genocidal ideologies have tended to have a “universal sense of the altruistic bond.”[14] They’ve been close to people who were being targeted. They haven’t wanted to see an entire group of people erased from the face of the earth, because that would mean losing their friends. Afterwards, they often said things like, “I did what anyone would have done,” or “I had no other choice,” or “you would have done the same for me.”[15] Friendship might be like an immunization against prejudice – and personally, I have found that once I have laughed with someone, once I have loved a person who is different than me, there is no going back. I think it’s important to create strong communities which transcend the boundaries of identity groups, to build bridges between unexpected places. I suspect that the trick is to connect people, not on the basis of identity, but over things which most people have in common no matter who they are – i.e., music, food, games, stories. (i.e., the “Break Down The Walls” documentary discussed a NYC prison abolitionist movement which doubled as a nightclub in the evenings.[16]) So share food, even if you have to add more water to the soup. Teach someone how to cook, if you know how – teach them the recipes you grew up with. Make music together, even if all you have is a singing voice that couldn’t carry a tune if it had handles and a couple of top 40 songs with words that everyone half-knows. You probably know someone who has a deck of cards, and if you don’t, yes you do, you can borrow mine, they’re a little bent out of shape but that doesn’t matter. Be the person in the room with the patience to teach the new kid how to play. Catch the misfits, the people most likely to wind up in dangerous places if they don’t have somewhere safe to come home to.

Stronger communities also tend to sooth that insecurity which makes people vulnerable to being indoctrinated. Sometimes all it takes to pull someone back from the brink of extremism is one person in a room who is able to be peaceful and considerate and kind when nobody else can. One solid presence in a room full of shaken people has a stabilizing influence.[17] I guess if I could ask you to do one thing to work to push back against the prejudice which precedes genocide, I would ask you to work at becoming that presence in a room – in any room. I’ll try, too.

            How do we find it in ourselves to do this? Whatever helps each of us hold onto perspective is excellent – a sense of humor, spirituality, medicine, whatever it may be. It’s different for everyone. Thich Nhat Hanh writes about the usefulness of being mindful, and practicing that skill until you are able to be mindful wherever you find yourself and whenever you need to be.[18] The Taoists discussed the importance of knowing when and how to yield, to let somebody else have their way, because over the course of time, the water the flows around the rocks that stand firm in the middle of the river will eventually wear the rocks down to nothing.[19]

Every so often, I look down at the blue veins on the inside of my wrist and remember they’re blue because of a molecule called hemoglobin which is responsible for carrying oxygen to my cells, and that hemoglobin contains trace amounts of iron, and iron can only be forged in the heart of a star that is dying. And so those blue lines on my wrist are literally full of stardust, which became part of the earth when it formed 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years ago, and traveling at the speed of light, which is as fast as it is possible to travel, it would take 81,000 years to get to the nearest star aside from the sun, and that is only the beginning.[20] This makes all of the problems on the surface of this exceptional little planet seem smaller, somehow, and perhaps more important for all of their smallness – because of all the possible lives I could have lived, I ended up living this one. Might as well make the most of it while I’m here.

From this perspective, it is easier to see that although humans are eminently capable of believing the worst of each other, of doing horrible things to one another, of succumbing to a hate so strong that erasing a group of people off the face of the planet sounds like a reasonable idea – this is not an inevitable outcome. Far from it.

There are documented case studies of nonviolent resistance to the Holocaust.[21] All across Europe, there were hundreds of networks of people who stood up to the Nazis. There were people who resigned in protest when they were asked to do unspeakable things. There were people who stayed on in those jobs, only to use their power to get people to safety. There were marches, strikes, boycotts, there were underground newspapers. There were people who sheltered innocent families in their homes, or helped them get to safety. There was resistance. These are the people who were not won over by the ideologies of prejudice, and who weren’t swept up in circumstance. Which means that there is hope.

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. A Report On The Banality of Evil

Attenborough. Gandhi. 1982.

Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men.

Baum, Stephen K. Psychology of Genocide.

Barnett, Brian. Gandhi’s Philosophy of Nonviolence.

Chenoweth, Erica. “Why Civil Resistance Works: Nonviolence in Past and Future.”

Cherry, Myisha. “David Livingstone Smith on Dehumanization,” Unmuted.

Collins, Phil. Break Down the Walls.

Dudai, Ron. Understanding Perpetrators of Genocide

Gan, Barry. Violence and Nonviolence: An Introduction.

Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler’s Willing Executioners

Gourevitch, Phil. We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

Hoff, Benjamin. The Tao of Pooh.

Holmes, Robert. “Understanding Evil from the Perspective of Nonviolence.” The Acorn.

How To Start A Revolution.

Introduction to Astronomy. OpenStax.

Johansen, “Hitler and the Challenge of Non-Violence”

Jones, Adam. “Social Psychology Explanations,” Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction

Milgram, Stanley. Studies on the Nature of Obedience

Nonviolent Tactics Database. https://www.tactics.nonviolenceinternational.net/

Nussbaum, Martha. Anger and Forgiveness

Paxton, George. Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis

Sharp, Gene. From Dictatorship to Democracy

Sharp, Gene. “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action.”

Sinclair, “Resisting the Nazis in Numerous Ways: Nonviolence in Occupied Europe”

Thich Nhat Han. Being Peace.

“War,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/

Zimbardo, Philip. The Stanford Prison Experiments: Studied on the Psychology of Imprisonment.

---

[1] Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy

[2] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

[3] Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men

[4] Brian Barnett, Gandhi’s Philosophy

[5] After genocide was made punishable under international law, African American folks in the U.S. were the first to write to the United Nations asking that their treatment – particularly the transatlantic slave trade, I think – be recognized as genocide. The request was denied.

[6] Myisha Cherry, Unmuted. 160

[7] Cherry, 159

[8] Cherry, 160

[9] Cherry, 162

[10] Bo Burnham, “Welcome to the Internet.” Inside.

[11] David Livingstone Smith

[12] Ursula Le Guin

[13] Wilson

[14] Stephen K. Baum, Psychology of Genocide

[15] Baum, Psychology of Genocide

[16] Phil Collins, Break Down the Walls

[17] Thich Nhat Han, Being Peace

[18] Thich Nhat Han, Being Peace

[19] Benjamin Hoff, The Toa of Pooh

[20] Introduction to Astronomy

[21] George Paxton, Nonviolent Resistance to the Nazis

There’s this thing that I do with my partner. It’s become a habit, something we do without thinking about it.

Whenever either of us is leaving to drive anywhere, we have a ritual. It starts out with the usual things – a longer than necessary hug, a quick kiss on the temple followed by “I love you” and “drive safe.” Then later it was “text me when you get there,” then “I’ll watch for your text.” Then – we don’t say goodbye, we stopped saying goodbye when one of the cleaning staff at the school where I work said “never say goodbye, it isn’t like you’re dying. Say it like you’re going to see each other again.” So we say “I’ll see you later,” or “I’ll see you soon,” because we will. Then usually fingers brush on the doorknob as one or the other is grabbing the car keys hanging on the hook on the way out the door, and then – for all that I dread leaving for work so much that most mornings there is vomit in the bathroom sink and my body can’t stop shaking and get warm – I always walk out of the front door smiling as I make my way into that apartment complex parking lot sunrise. There’s a glance back over my shoulder before the front door closes, there’s a reassuring smile.

And it’s like – the sameness of that moment is comforting. It’s like a spell we cast to make sure that all the chaos in the outside world leaves us untouched until we can make it home and see each other again. Because – “it’s a dangerous business, stepping outside your door.” And yet we must step outside, almost every morning. We navigate polluted highways where everyone is driving too fast, we drive past flashing lights in the rearview mirror at the scene of accidents like the ones that claimed my mother’s mother’s life.

Never say goodbye. It isn’t like you’re dying. Say it like you’ll see each other again.

“Call your representatives! Ask for a cease fire! It feels pointless, but just try. Tell Republicans this is unchristian and fiscally irresponsible. Tell democrats you won’t vote for them next election if they continue to support the bombings in Gaza.”

~ S.M.

The fifth of November

I’ve been restless all day.

Steve Rogers gave me an undercut because I trust him to cut my hair for me. Yoga, meditation (doesn’t work so well when you’re staring at a bookshelf full of your partner’s analytic trigonometry textbooks) and also calisthenics. Today I’ve roasted three pans of sweet potatoes and another full pan of pumpkin seeds with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, brown sugar,, and salt.

Breakfast was croissants with lemon curd, omlette with red onion and mushrooms and gouda, and veggie breakfast sausage. Dinner was salad and soup with garlic bread (garlic confit).

Tonight we’re watching Silence of the Lambs. We also carved a pumpkin into a jack-o-lantern with crooked teeth. Currently enjoying a chocolate beer which tastes like drinking trick or treaters’ candy.

I put a witch hat on my bright purple, life sized, 3D printed skull – which will suffice for any further seasonal decorations. This is easily one of the best things I accumulated in college.

My favorite thing about star wars was Carrie Fisher’s portrayal of the princess. Especially her silly side buns.

Cigarette smoke from the window of a passing car

Dry leaves rustling over the pavement

A cool breeze

Blue jeans against the skin of my calves

Soles of my shoes on the sidewalk

And the warmth of the sun.

The price per gallon on the sign at the gas station around the corner from the school (right across from Carter Street) has been exactly the same for three months.

It’s snowing.

“Match to the fifth.”

– homemade potato soup with vegetable broth, smoked gouda, garlic bread, and crackers. Grilled cheese with mustard and Sweet Baby Ray’s.

– blankets on the couch

– beer & wine

– flannels and blue jeans

– pumpkins

– grading stacks and stacks of papers. data collection for the gradebook.

– reading poetry at night

– watching old episodes of Gilmore Girls and tuning in to watch NFL games on TV (for free, with our antenna)

– watching Bob Dylan play the harmonica, live in concert

OKAY SO THERE’S A NAME FOR THIS

As if Florence and Andrew Hozier Byrne had a grandmother with a vocal prowess far surpassing Allison Krauss or Julie Andrews.

Many thanks to my community college librarian for the tickets. I hope they’re feeling better soon.

“The consequences of sin are often most keenly felt by the innocent.”

~ from a recent sermon at the church, heard live over the airwaves, pertaining to the bombing of the hospital in Gaza.

Watching the Karate Kid and eating pizza.

Currently obsessed with an online (probably very unethical) clothing company called Cider. They sell pretty dresses. In spite of the number of flannels in my closet, I am secretly fond of pretty dresses.

Attending a Loreena McKennitt concert in the city tomorrow.

My sister has turned 21. This happened weeks ago, but we’re partying anyway, even if that means we are partying late.

I’m taking her out to get a beer at a local restaurant and brewery that is about three minutes from my apartment, and just about ten minutes from her trailer park. She is old enough to drink beer now. This is all very exciting and new because she has never had an alcoholic beverage before very recently, definitely not, no ma’am.

Dinner’s on me, anyhow.

We’re getting cali wings dressed in country sweet sauce and fries with gravey and cheese and bacon all over everything. And probably macaroni and cheese, or perhaps potato pancakes. I’m really, really psyched about the cali wings. With blue cheese dressing. This is gonna be so good.

Earlier today I baked the oatmeal chocolate cake recipe which has been in the family for many generations. I may or may not have smuggled over some cake in a Tupperware container and – at the suggestion of Steve Rogers – I also brought a lighter and a birthday candle.

She ought to be here in about five minutes. We’re going to have a good time.

Pal, this time

It is real.

Things my students like.

Koi swimming in a fish tank
Orange leaves falling on the sidewalk
Fire and violence in the middle east
A child graffitis the name of the girl she likes in sharpie on the walls of the school
A room of kids, twelve years old, sitting for their October history exam
Testing to see how much they’ve learned about the world
Anticipating pumpkin pie for dessert
Warm blankets, tea, and a cat at home
My hands shake a little
As the weather turns cold.

If I had known

When I sent you out of class, because

You couldn’t sit still in your seat,

because

you can’t sit in a chair like a normal human being, because

You can’t stop talking to everyone around you

Calling them rude names

Like you’re desperate for everyone to see you

Just to see you

If I had known that your mom was going to pull up to the school

And find me in the hallway

Saying, “I just want to apologize to my daughter. I took care of it,”

And then show me the battered old belt in her hand

I would have just let you be.

Keep writing her name next to yours. Don’t you stop.

It doesn’t matter if we find out what color the walls of the school used to be when the custodial staff scrubbs off the graffiti

Never give up on her.

There are poems I want to sneak into your backpack

When you aren’t looking

I just feel like angry feminist slam poetry with butch lesbian energy would help you so much right now

Especially on the days when your skin is still hurting from the day before.

And if I didn’t know about the way it is at home for you then I might risk it.

Don’t stop writing her name.

Butternut squash

Onion

Garlic

Cumin

Ginger

Coriander

Turmeric

Salt

Olive oil

Coconut milk

Vegetable stock

Lime

~

Roast squash in oven with salt and olive oil for 38 minutes. Sauté onions and garlic in olive oil in a soup pot. Add spices and stock. Add squash and milk. Simmer for 32 minutes. Add lime. Blend.

~

It was a dark and stormy knight –

“Match to the sixth.”

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been exploring the zen center in the city where I live. It’s this absolutely lovely buddhist temple where everyone is barefoot all the time, no shoes ever, and there’s often hot green tea, and there’s a garden full of trees.

I really like the part where I don’t have to wear shoes. (It’s probably the hobbit genetics from my grandmother.)

I’ve heard various iterations of the stories and philosophies of the buddha since I was a kid. That part of the experience – the stories, anyhow – they’re important. But for me I think the practice is becoming the most important thing.

The instructions for meditation are basically to sit perfectly still and stare at a blank wall and count to ten and breathe. And if your nose itches, don’t scratch – just notice the feeling. And when you notice your thoughts start to wander, start over with the counting. Over and over again. And we do this for like ten or fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, and then shift into walking meditation, and then return to the seat and settle in for another round. Listen to the sound the building makes and breathe and watch the thoughts tumble through.

The purpose of this is to be more fully present in this moment, not distracted by rumination over the past or worry about the future. I like that purpose, in theory.

Except that at first, I – really hate this practice. I’ve tried it before with little success. It’s one of the most uncomfortable experiences I’ve ever put myself through. Aside from one or two instances of profound physical pain, and some of the episodes when my mental illness symptoms got just exceptionally shitty, this is right up there with the most distressing moments for me.

Because my brain never fucking quiets down. This is the mind that finds patterns in dates and license plates and phone numbers, scrambles and unscrambles the letters in every brand name, connects the dots and makes triangles in the stars with invisible lines, considers the possibility of conspiracy theories, finds words inside of other words, dredges up Poor Decisions from years ago and presents them to my conscious awareness like a cat giving her gaurdian a dead bird, as a present.

Yeah. This brain. Trying to settle down.

Worse than trying to quiet down a room of 33 seventh graders. Take it from me.

At first meditation feels like getting stuck in the dark in the cold wind on the side of the mountain without a coat. It’s fucking miserable.

The counting helps.

I’m going to keep trying because there’s a promise of some kind of peacefulness on the other side of the struggle. I think – I need to practice more often at home. I may have jumped in at the deep end.

I also keep going back because the temple is beautiful.

Steve Rogers thinks so, too.

My students have last names like Rodriguez and Garcia and Jones and Johnson and Jackson (“I’m sorry Ms. Jackson…”) and if I had a dollar for every Jeremiah in the 7th grade I would have $3, which isn’t that many dollars. But it still feels like a lot.

The inside of my brain has been giving John Nash vibes recently and I really don’t like this.

The mortifying ordeal of reading things you wrote on the internet like four years ago

The other day I heard one of my students cry out as we were packing up to leave, and I turned around, and she said this group of boys had been bothering her. And ultimately it turned out that they’d only been pulling on her hair but my first thought was something so much worse and I’ve always been protective so the first words out of my mouth before I could think were “touch her again and I will hurt you,” and that might not have been the wisest thing to say to a group of twelve year old boys. Epecially as a teacher. But somebody has to teach young men to leave girls the hell alone. And sometimes it has to be that straightforward of a message. Just to get the point across.

I could never hurt a child and I’m not proud of what I said. I just needed them to know.

Steve Rogers/Remus Lupin/Calvin O’Keefe/Palamedes Sextus/Strider/William Turner is doing so good.

When you’re tired and don’t want to sleep because of the bad dreams, consider –

if you don’t sleep well for long enough, the nightmares persist in bothering you when you are awake.

Their twisted internal logic doesn’t have to make sense to you or anyone else. They don’t even have to be real. They’re just spooky and upsetting and cause tremendous grief.

When the plots are rich and full and fascinating stories and the characters are some of the people you love, you can’t help but watch as imaginary bad things happen to them

and it’s awful

And I wish I could send you good dreams.

• Need to do work in order to be prepared to teach next week
• Prospect of being unprepared for next week is stressful
• Stress makes me not want to do work and instead run away to the woods
• Running away to the woods would not help at all with being prepared for next week

Several people have recommended taking the lesson planning to the woods and doing it there. For the portion of the work which does not require a wifi connection, this is an excellent point.

Fun writing utensils only thing keeping me going today.

Today I went shopping and brought home some flowers, cleaned the apartment, and took out the trash. There are lots of ways to say “I love you” and actions speak louder than words.

It’s 6:15AM and I’m sitting with my partner in the morning, drinking coffee with oat milk and munching on a belgian chocolate waffle. My partner’s identity is a secret; for now we’ll just call him Steve Rogers. This is the best part of my day.

Befriend janitorial staff

– the neurodivergent experience of perceiving secret worlds of cryptic meaning everywhere because people don’t often just fucking say exactly what they mean –

A random thought – AT stands for apprentice teacher, as well as Appalachian Trail. I was focusing a lot of energy on those letters for almost two years as my possible future after college – and by some coincidence manifested another reality into being.

Never turn your back to the classroom.

Re: I don’t like yelling at kids – I’ve decided not to. I’m not fucking doing that. I woke up this morning and remembered that I’m the only white person in a room of like thirty black kids. I’m a grown ass adult. They’re fucking eleven. I did not sign up for this bullshit. It feels like pouring salt all over a slug.

If they can’t sit still and be quiet because they are fucking nine years old, I won’t fucking ask them to do that. They can work with a partner and take up auditory space if they want.

They’re only like seven and I can already feel them starting to dislike me from all of the screaming and also my head hurts.

Not to brag or anything but one of my (basically newborn) kids pulled me aside yesterday and gave me a picture she’d drawn and told me I’m “one of her most favorite teachers ever” and says she hates it when I have to yell at people because I seem like a nice person

So – fuck. I’m not doing that anymore. We’re going to figure out another way to do this.

Christ.

I thoroughly despise yelling at kids.

Finding out that one of the worst behaved students in my class doesn’t have a home

Noticing the gap in the front teeth of my favorite girl

Telling my scholars how happy I am that they are here

Standing in the sweltering hot gymnasium and waiting for the bus. In the wrong shoes.

Calling my littlest lady by she/her because that’s what she prefers and I’m allowed to do that because she has support at home

For the student who is new – asking a group of girls to get to know him because he doesn’t have any friends yet, and hearing them say they’re happy to include him

Teaching everyone our very own secret handshake

Kneeling beside a desk to answer a question when a hand reaches into the air for help

And teaching.

For the fist time in my life.

The printer named Leonardo is my arch nemesis.

I can measure how stressful the day has been based on the number of writing utensils in my homeroom partner’s hair.

I teach my very first lesson on my own soon. I receive a hug, unprompted, from one of my students. I wonder if she can tell how nervous I am. She and I connected over ADHD – I told her I have it too, and she looked at me with big wide eyes and said “you too!?” and we talked about how we cope in a world that doesn’t work well for us.

The beads, the braids, the styles in my students’ hair are pleasantly distracting. They’re really into this thing called shadow boxing, which is adorable. With all my heart I wish I could let them just be kids instead of telling them to sit up quietly and straight with their eyes forward and their arms up on the desks.

I love them.

Some nights I will stay three hours late at work to valiantly fight in a vicious battle with a printer named Leonardo for as long as it takes to print 120 thick ass copies of the math lesson packet for tomorrow and then I will collapse into the car in a state of bruised and battered weariness and think, this is my life now, and then I’ll wake up at 5:30AM the next day to do it all over again in the wrong shoes.

But the kids are alright and I love them. So it’s worth it.

On my first night in a new home, it rains. There’s thunder and lighting outside the windows for hours. The floor between the kitchen and the rest of the apartment is flooded.

I have brought with me about a dozen comfy flannels, some blue jeans, a toothbrush and similar, and six totebags full of books. Roughly an eighth of an entire bookshelf is filled with the works of Sir Terry Pratchett.

Also have a healthy sourdough starter, along with a carboy full of mead.

At work, I am decorating my classroom with fake plastic plants. This is all I can find. I also want to add Christmas lights.

My classroom.

“You know – I think you would make an excellent math teacher,” says the Calc I professor in the hallway outside the classroom at community college. Years ago.

The people who’ve just hired me as an apprentice seem to agree.

“At this school, we’re more to these students than just a teacher. Some of these kids, they come here and this is all of the actual love and safety that they will receive in a day. So you aren’t just a teacher. You’re like a second mom. You’re an auntie, an uncle, a father figure, a gaurdian. And you’d better believe that we spoil them here. Some of these kids can really stand to benefit from our love.”

I’m about to preside over a cohort of children who are roughly eleven or twelve years old.

All of them will know more about living in this city than I do.

On my first commute home from work, there are gunshots. It isn’t a good neighborhood, but it’s an excellent school. One of the best in the city. Half of our first cohort of seniors just graduated with full ride scholarships to undergrad.

And I want to help.

Yes.

Lentil soup with garlic bread. Yoga and push ups and crunches on the floor in the study. Music through the speakers. Baking Sourdough bread.

Last night was Yahtzee and chocolate and popcorn and fried pickles and Doctor Who. It’s been good.

Have done what feels like absolutely nothing over the past couple of days. Generally vibing with my partner, whose identity shall remain mysterious at this time. Last night we made grilled cheese sandwiches with basil, mustard, tomato, cheddar, and pepperjack cheese on rosemary bread. There’s also been a lot of red wine.

We are currently reading my old copy of The Princess Bride out loud. Alternating between watching a documentary series on the history of jazz music and rewatching Twin Peaks. This makes me happy.

Also got to visit some alpacas at a “fancy ass tea party” up at the farm. Happy to report that there were cucumber sandwich ingredients.

Had to wake up early for work this morning. There was coffee. I am finding that I like driving through the city on the expressways at sunrise. Walks after dinner listening to music, red raspberries and ice cream from a mug, flavored coffee with sweetened oat milk creamer, time in the shower, and a book to read at night.

I’ve started gardening again.

Pulling weeds for an older gentleman from church who often complains about his knees. He insists that the lily growing in his side garden is purple. I disagree, because it’s obviously pink. We argue back and forth about this for a while. He says his wife would have agreed with me, if she were still with us. She passed on of dimensia a few years ago.

Today I drove up to the farm, met baby chickens, greeted numerous cats, was stung by a bee, got dirt in my eye, and did not die of heatstroke due to the farmer’s attentive worrying. I cleared the weeds from around the blueberries and gooseberries.

Let go of every might have been and live for this moment right now.