My cousin on the other side of the pond is ridiculously happy and she deserves it.
More and more of the people around me are getting vaccinated and I’m starting to feel like there’s hope.
I scheduled a certain appointment at a local clinic and I’m very stoked.
Homemade brownies exist and they are lovely and there’s absolutely no such thing as too many of them.
My dad is breathing. This is important. Sometimes he has a hard time breathing and it’s worrisome, but he’s still here.
The flowers are coming out, around campus. There’s a kind of tree with thick, waxy white blossoms planted at each corner of the quad. I sometimes have to stop and just look at them for a minute.
As much as each day feels overwhelmingly full of things to do, in the beginning, I am finding that I’m able to get through them – moving slowly, deliberately, one moment at a time.
My cat has started curling up into a ball on my chest and purring, when I lay down to sleep at night. It’s centering.
I can keep going to school. I had a moment this week of not being sure I would be able to keep going to school because of arbitrary factors like scheduling and money and class credits and time. But I can keep going.
The skill of discernment. The ability to sit down and squint hard at a messed up ball of anxiety and gut feelings and sometimes tell the difference between those things, so that I can work out what’s actually true.
I have friends. This is a hard thing to believe, most of the time, because I never expected that it would happen. But it’s real. And it makes me so happy.
I have a fidget cube, a cup of coffee, a dose of necessary controlled substances, and a healthy serving of that particular anxiety that only shows up when you’re sitting perfectly still looking at your phone and you know you’ve got Things that need doing by 11:59 in the evening but you can’t – move –
I stayed up until 3AM watching familiar movies about pirates and also superheroes. I have spent my entire morning looking at memes. There’s an Alanis Morissette song stuck in my head.
And you know what I guess I should clarify that the superheroes and the pirates did not appear in the same movie, although that combination would be the absolute best. I can totally see it.
This weekend is a weekend for putting my hair up and out of my face and drinking tea and writing term papers. This is a weekend for true crime podcasts and Taylor Swift albums, for excel spreadsheets, for thick readings about the philosophies of distributive justice. These next few minutes are for doing laundry. At least one hour before bed sometime soon is for drawing up connections between epistemology and political discourse. At least a couple more of those hours are for naps.
I wish I had a largish whiteboard, an attention span, possibly a soulmate, understanding, and more time.
Ice cream sandwiches, in the back of a pickup truck, in a rainstorm, hitchhiking from Boston, Massachusetts to New Port, Oregon. Only one person is allowed to wear a button down. Rock, paper, scissors tournaments are involved in deciding which one. Two out of three. Let’s go.
You know what else, though –
A hypothetical space in which nobody had to be made invisible, or make themselves invisible, if they didn’t want to be.
A space where nobody ever had to tell anyone that they were valid because the concept of a lack of validity didn’t exist.
A space in which people approached one another with curiosity instead of expectations.
A space where nobody had to come out, because y’all had never made the assumption that existing in any particular fashion is a deviatation from the norm.
Purely hypothetically, I think this would be wonderful, and I kind of want to go and physically build places like this with my own bare hands.
I’m saying this because I am very good at making myself invisible. I didn’t even get to be that way on purpose. It’s just a habit. Being a pathological liar is a habit. So is not ever saying certain things out loud.
And sometimes it hurts.
So it would be fucking beautiful for nobody to ever have to feel that way. Not if I could help it.
This week I’m learning about the birth of stars, and it’s lovely
I found a fidget cube in my house and it’s keeping me sane
Boots
The immediate relief from the pain that is so constant that I don’t notice it anymore, when I found some aloe vera gel and put in on the evil daemon acne from hell
Muffins. Banana walnut, specifically
Suez canal shenanigans. The memes have been truly excellent.
The existence of little people
Neurodivergence in all of its forms, because the world would be a flat and colorless place if it weren’t for the people who were born to see things differently.
German past participle words. Those are nifty
Water pressure in the shower
Walks with my dad
House
Radio broadcasts
Spiders who don’t mind taking a short trip from the ceiling over my bed to the outdoors
Beeswax candles
Every person who has ever taken the time to make a text post about the way mental illness shows up in their life and makes things difficult, because that little bit of “ah, okay, this is a thing that happens to other people” is insanely reassuring
The friend who doesn’t mind when I send dozens of memes at a time
The friend who doesn’t judge when I talk about stealing plastic turtles from a gift shop, multiple years ago, in a different state
My phone. This place to go and rest and watch TV or look at cute things that make me laugh at 3AM when everything seems bleak
This space to write
The sound of birds outside
A place to rest in the sunlight
Did I mention this fidget cube? It clicks and makes other satisfying noises
When my head got stuck in the back of a chair Don’t know how, I guess I was talented.
I still remember the feeling Fragile bones, soft flesh Trapped between two metal bars Screaming for what felt like hours Because I couldn’t move I couldn’t get out And nobody was around To hear me crying For I can’t remember how long
Eventually, my father found me Had to go get an electric drill And take the screws out of the chair Inches away from my face and ears And then I was free, but still shaking
Ever since then I’ve hated the sensation of not being able to move Of being stuck in tight places Anything wrapped around my neck Pushing down on the back of my head
When I walk on cold days without a scarf My neck feels vulnerable and fragile When I drive in a car I imagine unexpected collisions At every intersection I anticipate the snap Then nothingness.
If past lives exist, I wonder if Maybe, I wonder if I was hung from a tree I wonder, was I French aristocracy
And sometimes I throw up Just thinking about it.
And so, now When I think about Knees and necks Uniforms and innocents When I think about Eight mins and 46 sec’s When I think about Running out of breath It gets to me.
And eight fucking minutes & 46 sec’s Was a long fucking time to kneel on his neck It’s a long time to watch the light fade from his eyes It’s too long not to move while an innocent dies
And it hurts.
And I remember the feeling, from back in the day Fragile bones, baby flesh, a cold, red, metal cage Could not fucking move. It was sort of absurd. But then what would have happened if nobody heard
And the child whose breath comes in sharp little gasps and cries
Reaches out to the man who can’t breathe, while he dies
Breakable, fragile bodies in similar places
Empathy is stronger than race, gender, age based expectations
My fingers fly to my throat, and that’s probably why
It still gets me this much, thinking of how he died.
And it’s so far away from being the same But it gives me enough to relate to the pain Of one man, amount thousands, who died in this way. Just a little. Barely a fraction. A smidge. Just an echo, a blur, an imagined image
But if even that smidge haunted me for a life
then I think I can understand all of the strife
The fire and the call and the pressure to change /the world so that this never happens again
In this world where the lynchings never actually stopped
There’s gonna be a trial, for the blue boy, the cop, today
Out of thousands, participating or complicit in a legacy of violence
Even as they pass laws in Georgia
Making it illegal to bring water to those waiting in line to vote
I just want to stop and take a second to note
That I don’t
Want to live in a world where generations of people can’t know
If it’s gonna be a gun or a knee or a rope
– snap, then nothingness –
So hold your head up high
We’ve got a long way to go.
I just want to make this world into the kind of space
where everybody is some kind of semblance of heard and safe
Where the trauma that lingers and continues to be perpetuated
Patchwork white and crumbling shingles Beside newer white siding Keeping out the rain Periodically interrupted By a plethora of windows Letting in the light
Uneven white paint on old, old walls Sun through wide kitchen windows Barn roof shingles on the grass after wind Cobwebs in living room corners Textured blue plastic porch floor Expanse of deck, with a barbecue smell On the warm, windy days.
French glass doors covered in Smudges of dog nose prints Only one door ever opens Except at Christmas When we bring in the tree.
Heavy iron pellet stove Chipped red painted floor Adjacent scratched cherry floorboards Peeling white painted door frames Mismatched light fixtures (especially the round one in the middle of the ceiling that the youngest daughter unabashedly refers to as the ceiling titty) Threadbare grey love seat, and crocheted blankets, for naps Television, in the evenings Doctor Who, Marvel Shrek, The Matrix, Scrooge, It’s A Wonderful Life.
Piano that nobody knows how to play Globe on top of one bookshelf (the one with the sliding glass door) Old clock on the armoir with the blankets And the dusty games, the wooden chess set With the green velvet lining Losing horribly to cousins Every time.
Dark, wood grainy kitchen cupboards With the mismatched set of dishes Thick white plates with pink rose pattern Around the edges Thick white counter top Coffee maker, toaster, clutter, sink With two taps, one with softer water A small black handle, older than me. Stainless steel pots in the corner cuppboard The one with the hinged door that bends My older sister crawled inside once In the very beginning Cranked linoleum kitchen floor That sags in the middle And looks like woven white and brown square tiles, arranged in a simple pattern That repeats, over and over again
White Christmas lights over the windows The BOSE radio on top of the microwave The stack of CD’s Listening to Live From Here Coloring at the kitchen table Baking cookies and cutting them out Doing math homework Prisms and knickknacks by the windows Casting rainbows on the floor and walls When there is bright sun in the morning
The door to the creepy stone basement with the cobwebs and the untrustworthy stairs The door to the pantry The mudroom The room with the sink And the room where the cats sleep And the room to the rest of the house.
The steep wooden stairwell We keep the door closed because of the cats. Painted insane pink, because my mother Let five year old me choose the color The plaster lump in the stairway wall That looks like a monster lives inside Breathing slowly
Uneven wooden floorboards, rickety railing
The little hallway with four doors Attic, bathroom, bedroom, bedroom. You have to cross a narrow bridge Over the stairs To get into the attic
God, the attic Where I have been sleeping Since I was thirteen Since I needed a space of my very own. The attic Filled with three generations Mother, grandmother, and great grandmother Doilies, Christmas tree ornaments Soapstone, old cloth Dusty telescope Old trunks full of tiny dress up clothes Stuffed animals Old diaries Children’s books Carefully preserved Two windows And the terrible ugly vanity Inherited from somewhere With drawers full of my candles And small tangible things I hang on to, to remember Like the paper with the first calculus problem that I ever asked for help with in college.
Downstairs, again The wooden statue of a heron With its head high and its wings folded By the windows The rickety table Doing homework Under the roof In the shade of the big pine tree Strumming guitar on the porch steps Cradling stray kittens in our arms Sitting in Hammock chairs and reading
And always the unpaved road Running north to south Across from the driveway Mailbox across the street The unpaved road with the bend in it And the creek, and the fields, and the woods Endless walks, every day, forever Not really ours, but as much part of home As any of the rest of everything
The row of maple trees, the pines, the cherry tree, the tree house tree with white blossoms, the linden tree which we planted, the apple trees, the peach trees, and the gardens
And the views of blue hills Fields and hedgerows, watertowers The stillness and the quiet That everyone noticed Whenever they visited They always noticed the quiet
And the fire pit that I build and dug with my own hands and a shovel, “all by myself” (But not really, I had help)
And the stone covered grave Where we buried my girl My sweet, black lab, coonhound baby The one they adopted The summer the year I was born
And the one who is still with us Who has terrible arthritis But still loves to go for walks
And all of the cats, so many, over the years.
I don’t want to leave this place. I don’t want any of this to ever change. I don’t want to lose this, I don’t want to have to give it up.
But mostly, I want to remember. So I make it into words.
cats, the peepers in the hollow, the storm coming over the valley, daffodils opening, boots, mud, driving with the windows down, songs from that old mix tape from when I was fifteen, the MCU, getting caught outside when it’s raining, noodles, home, pants that fit, perspective, water & candles when the power goes out, crocuses, three days of t-shirt weather, an entire day of eating popcorn and watching anime, the option to cry when I need to, my folks, my little sister’s stick & poke tattoo, dogs, a place to sleep, the handful of safe things in this world that is very hard to live in and be a part of.
Grounded, instead of trembling Competent, instead of flying by the seat of my pants all the time. More skilled at regulating my feelings, and infinitely more graceful when communicating about them Connected, instead of attached Confident, instead of hot and bothered Courageous, instead of frozen Wise, instead of perpetually confused Unfuckwithable, instead of delicate Laughing uproarious, instead of offended Discerning, instead of judgemental Capable, instead of fumbling Comfortable in my own skin Content, instead of always in pain Chill, instead of jealous Patient, instead of restless Present, instead of distracted Conscientious, instead of prejudiced Honest, instead of pathologically not
Soft and warm, instead of carrying this impossible awkwardness that feels like the wall of a glass honey jar between me and the rest of the world
(These binaries are not absolute truths, but they are tools to help me understand.)
And all of this is a little strange.
Because, incidentally, here are some of the things that exist in absolutely everyone I care about, and I don’t really care:
In the people I love, there be tremors, fumbling, fucked up attachment styles, perpetual confusion, impossible awkwardness, harsh judgments, discomfort inside of their skin bags, fragility, a tendency to flee or fight or freeze, hot fucking botheredness, difficulty feeling and talking about feeling, restlessness, entire hidden rooms that never open, impatience, dishonesty, jealousy, insecurity, distraction, and so much constant pain
And I don’t care. I see y’all. I know you, a little. I’m not pretending we aren’t all incredibly messy and fucked up. It’s just that these are not the things which will stop me from wanting to be your friend.
Maybe some of them used to be. But I’m so tired of shutting people out of my life. I’m so tired of thinking of people as disposable because we aren’t.
Please. We have so little time, here. Please remember that you accidently forgot your scarf in my life, and come back for it.
And to be very fair, I think – I think there are times in the course of a life when, in order to stay safe, you have to be a little cold. But I think they’re further and farther between than my mother taught me. I don’t want to be cold anymore.
I’m trying to learn how to love imperfect people, because if I don’t I will never know love. And I’ll never be safe in my own skin, if I don’t learn how to get by with the having of the faults.
It’s easy to say I love you anyway to everyone but myself. I’m trying so hard to learn, but it’s difficult.
I love you in spite of all of the things that are uncomfy. Perhaps even because of them.
I can give you this one gift when I can’t give very much of anything else. It isn’t much, but it’s all that I have.
To the best of my understanding at this time, eight people were murdered in Atlanta, Georgia, last Tuesday. Seven of them were women, and six of them were Asian women. If I’m wrong about this, I’ll try to put out corrections in a future post.
Hello, friend. I need a moment to breathe.
I want to take a moment to think about death. To think about what that means. To think about the absence of life.
And then I want to take a moment to think about dying. About the last moments of a life. About how most of us want to go out – safe, surrounded by loved ones, or nuzzled one last time by a familiar snout of a cat or a dog, or sleeping.
I want to take the moment and think about what it must be like for the last moments of a life to be filled with confusion, shock, fear, pain, horror. The last moments of the first person perspective experience of this world, spent like this.
I want to take a moment to think about what it must feel like to get up in the morning and not know that this was going to be your last day alive.
Grief. I want to talk about grief.
I want to think about that phone call. The first moment you hear that news. The immediate need to find somewhere to sit down. The tears. The attempt to remember the last time you spoke with them.
Think about times when we’ve all lived through the rest of that day, after hearing the news. And that week, and that month, and that year.
I don’t know what it’s like to loose someone like this. Not in this specifically horrible way. And I don’t mind saying that I hope I never know this pain. I hope I never inflict this pain on others. I would not wish this on anyone.
I have met death in other ways. I’ve lost creatures and people whom I knew or loved in violent unexpected ways, and long, drawn out, and tired ways. But it was never like this.
My heart goes out to the people in the lives of these eight people who were killed.
As for the person who did this – I felt shaken when I realized that he is the same age as me. Maybe even younger.
We talked about him in philosophy class, yesterday. One classmate says he ought to be tortured, slowly, for the rest of his days, because death is too good for him. One classmate says he does deserve to die.
I would rather not kill anyone at all, actually. I don’t know that it would make any difference. Those eight people would still be gone. And I don’t want to deprive him of all of the time he could spend alive in the knowledge of what he has done. All those sleepless nights. Honestly, I don’t want him to deprive of the pain of remorse.
That felt cold. I’m not often cold, but sometimes I can be.
That’s enough for right now.
I think this individual is one manifestation of a problem that runs deep and very wide and right now it’s growing. I’m specifically referring to rise in hate crimes directed towards Asian folks since the beginning of the pandemic, because… well. People wanted somebody to blame for their problems, a scapegoat for all of the hurt. And it’s wrong. It’s exactly what happened to Jewish folk in Germany. And look what happened then.
It makes sense to look for a reason to explain why the world hurts so much. I get it. I understand the impulse. But please, not like this. Please don’t make it the fault of people who seem different on the outside. Please. There’s so much diversity among us, within us, between us, and it’s a beautiful thing. We don’t have to be afraid of it. We don’t have to shove the others to the edges, like they’re somehow less. Because they’re not. Nobody is.
Maybe there’s something that all of us can do to keep things like this from happening. Maybe. I don’t know.
Because… yeah.
I need to breathe.
I want to think about what it means to a person to know that they are especially at risk. And to never feel truly safe, anywhere. I want to think about what it means for many different people who share a similar burden to speak up and say, “we don’t feel safe,” and for nobody to listen. Until it was too fucking late, for some of them.
When a person or a group of people is telling you that they’re being targeted, that they’re in danger and that they need help…
Fucking listen.
The Chinese food place in town burned down at the beginning of the pandemic. There’s another place a little bit south of us, and one near the college that I’m currently attending. I want to go to them and give them my patronage. I don’t know how they’re faring in this place and during this time, but I want them to still be here and be doing okay once we get through all of this. I’ve been peripherally aware of this since a friend invited me to do something similar at the very beginning of all of this, a year ago. I haven’t been very good about doing this, but right now seems like a good time.
It seems like a small thing, but I think it matters. This is something which I can do, even in the middle of everything. Because sometimes engaging with community in a bunch of little ways on a very local level is the best that anyone can do, especially during the hard times.
These are hard times. I’m beginning to wonder if this is just how the world is, if my expectations of ease are naive. If that is the case, I think I’m going to need a thicker skin.
Writing helps me, like it always does.
Thank you for reading. I hope you’re alright, today.
Every once in a while I sit down and write down things which, to me, are some combination of satisfying or funny or comforting or grounding or lovely or beautiful and strange.
I need to do this. I think it pulls everything back into balance. When I leave my brain to its own devices, it will spend too much time in the dark.
Also these things are wonderful and deserve to be noticed, in their own right. I am surrounded by these things, all the time. They’re right fucking there. What kind of person would I be if I couldn’t see them?
Maybe you can see them, too.
Here are some good things:
really good storytelling
affectionate cats
also, less affectionate cats who need a little time to feel comfortable
cats who are absolutely terrible
shoes that fit
every crocheted blanket anywhere
radio stations with long stretches of uninterrupted familiar songs
sharpened pencils and pens that have enough ink in them
filters available on smart phone cameras which make pictures look so much prettier
my voice. singing in the car, alone, badly, to keep the darkness away and keep me from feeling nauseous
the German poem which I read in its entirety this week
interesting astronomy observations
(Parallax is fucking fascinating. So are the stars and all the ways we learn things about them.)
long rambling talks about Ethics
Vincent van Gogh
Skepticism
The friend who helped me build a schedule for this semester which is actually working beautifully
The Last Podcast on the Left
all this time I have before my term papers are due
the birds, who are coming back
whoever set me on the path of looking for nuance and presupposing complexity and thinking outside of the boxes and outside of binaries. Thank you.
the book that taught me that it’s not what things seem like, it’s what things are like. (A Wrinkle in Time)
whoever taught me how to listen.
whoever set me on the path of reflection; (Hello!!)
the professor who told me that there’s hope for a growing acceptance of different kinds of people, because he’s seen it grow so much in just the space of one lifetime
the recent aspiration to pack my bags and head south and become a sort of homeless boondocking nomad. This has actually been very fun to think about.
online learning.
the capacity to pause or rewatch lectures and walk away from them when I get tired, or if I need to write something down
the capacity to watch lectures on 1.5x playback speed, because it helps me focus
learning from my bed, my couch, my place at the kitchen table
memes and funny posts that make me laugh inside. I have officially hacked my Instagram algorithm and now this is it, that is all there is. Just memes
and sometimes pictures of the night sky from very dark places.
the first time I was able to drink coffee in several weeks
I went out for a three mile walk in the heat of the sun, and there was a warm breeze over everything. It was lovely.
I also found time to take the Hammock outside and string it up between two trees. I curled up there for maybe a half an hour. I didn’t sleep, but I almost did. It was lovely.
My eyelids are a tad sunburned. They’re cranking, just a little pink.
Tonight I am sleeping with my window open for the first time since October.
Tomorrow is supposed to be even more lovely than today was. In spite of all of the school things, I’m looking forward to it.
Maybe this is only a false Spring. A now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t March parade of days that are only going to fade back into the cold again.
But whatever this is, whatever it’s been, it has lifted my spirits.
And small green shoots poking through the ground speak to hope of warmer days, coming. Barefoot days, campfire days, days spent out on the water or up in the trees.
This morning my dad and I sat at the kitchen table and sipped coffee and finally watched the videos of Perseverance landing on Mars. We both teared up at the end when the folks at NASA were jumping up and down and cheering and crying and hugging and it was a good time.
I am more than peripherally aware of this kind of thing right now because I’m taking an Astronomy class from a professor who is absolutely head over heels in love with his subject, who wants to share that feeling of wonder with each of his students. It’s kind of lovely to see.
Studying things that scientists know about space and galaxies and stars does more for me than just offer perspective. I think that the things I’m learning are beautiful. Every little detail is so neat that it’s actually charming.
The light that reaches the earth today was formed in the heart of the sun about a million years ago. It takes a million years for the gamma rays, born when hydrogen smashes together to form helium and matter is converted into energy, to make it from the middle of the sun out the edges. Once the gamma rays make it to the edge, they’ve lost some of their energy and aren’t as dangerous for life. It takes about eight minutes for this light to travel – as fast as anything in the universe can travel – from the sun to the earth, and by the time it reaches us, the atmosphere around the earth has made the light that reaches us safe for life to continue to thrive.
But the light that rains down on the earth today was born about a million years ago and I think that this is beautiful.
Light is old.
Learning about the universe feels like getting to know a person, a person with lots of little interesting quirks and dark places and vast swaths of secrets they haven’t told anybody yet. But the universe might tell her secrets, one day, if we learn how to communicate with each other.
I hope it’s a good morning, today. Sometime, take a second to notice the light.
I feel like I should go to sleep. But I also want to stay awake, so that I can have more time to think about things.
Did you know that if you take a left down US route 20 and just keep going, you’ll eventually end up at the pacific ocean?
The specific town there at the edges of things is actually called Newport, Oregon. On your way to there, you’ll pass straight through not just Yellowstone National Park, but about a half a dozen other slices of creation which are just as sprawling and beautiful and neat. Bare bones of the earth. The pictures of some of them look like pictures taken on Mars or on the Moon. Other-worldly. In one of them there’s an enormous waterfall and in another, there are rows of sand dunes along a beach. Yet another is folded into the arms of a harbor on the left coast. Then there are the rock formations, smooth bedrock, jagged and dark edges of stone and sand, crators and canyons and caves carved into the edges of the landscape.
Did you know that if you step out onto the road and just keep going, you’ll find things you never ever knew existed…
Also along US route 20 you’ll find cities like Chicago, Boise, Cleaveland, and basically Portland Oragon if you’re willing to stray off the beaten path a little.
Favorite other attractions include a potato museum in Idaho, and a free zoo in the middle of Chicago. There’s also a memorial to Anne Frank.
Off the north side of US route 20 in a small town called Lima, in NY, there is a small house where my parents were living while my mother was pregnant with me.
A little further East, there’s a smallish city called Canandaigua. I know it very well.
Boston, Massachusetts is the easternmost bookend of things. I once visited an aquarium, there. And there were penguins. This is most of what I remember.
I want to travel again. I miss it so much.
I feel like Ariel, confined within a pine tree. Only my pine tree is growing – no, living – in the front yard near my house.
I want to get in the car and go. Go to the woods and the water, go to the mountains, go to the hills. To the Badlands, to Alaska, down Route 66 to California, over to Nova Scotia, across the continent. Back across the ocean, one day, maybe. Definitely.
Everywhere.
Except that there is COVID-19.
Except that I don’t want to leave my cats, my dog, my staircase and my kitchen and my bookshelf and my attic, my mother and my sister and my dad.
Still, there’s a backpack packed and ready in the corner of my attic. In that backpack, there’s a sleeping bag, a first aid kit, some duct tape and a bandana, a length of cord, a pocket knife, some matches, and a tarp…
I could get along fine. I could do this.
I’m not putting things off until someday. I’m making the plans, carving them into the pages of old notebooks. I’m waiting for the world to recover from this sickness. But just as soon as she’s ready…
I want to fly.
I’m coming back. I’ll always come back. And I’ll see you when I see you.
Does it count as procrastination if it’s very intentional?
Anyway. I gave myself the gift of two days off, from studying. And I needed this.
Soo much.
So a good thing happened.
I have walked a little every day for the last nine days. It’s been almost a year since I’ve felt able to do this. I don’t walk fast and I don’t walk far, but I’m walking. A little every day. I walked today and I will walk again tomorrow and every time I come back from walking my mind feels clearer, more centered, calm. They say it takes a certain amount of time to built a habit. And it’s hard when boughts of mental illness keeps disrupting the patterns that I’m trying to build. But every time I’m able to get back up after being knocked down, it’s like… I remember. My body remembers how to remember to walk. And because I remember, it isn’t as hard to settle back into old habits again.
Writing. Walking. These things are old and familiar and they are mine and they’re just two reasons out of hundreds of reasons to stay.
Here are some things I did this week instead of studying:
Listened to a podcast about how to save the planet
Watched a George Clooney science fiction movie with my dad
Ate chocolate ice cream
Organized my bookshelf and let go of a handful of the ones that someone else might like more than me
Worked on planning a road trip with the wife, for not this summer but next because planning something for the future gives me so much hope to hold onto
Thought about campfires
Watched all the episodes featuring River Song in the eleventh Doctor’s chapter of Doctor Who
Slept, and had strange dreams about an unfamiliar beach
Stayed off the Z*ckerberg platforms, for the most part
Stole strawberries
Sipped coffee
Thought about Maslow and child psychology
Thought about epistemology and ethics and how they are connected
Put on socks and shoes and went outside and up the driveway and down the road, and took them off and set them aside again when I got home
And walked every day for nine days.
And it was good.
I also aquired a length of paracord, a space blanket, some duct tape, and a bandana, a rough first aid kit, and some chocolate, and threw everything in a backpack in case I need to go on an adventure.
The problem is that I don’t know where I’d go or if I can ever leave this place. I have to stay and make a lap for a tabby cat in an old not-leather chair and burry my face in her hair and breathe in the smell of dust and honey.
I can’t run away and drive south and sleep in my car and complete all my classes from Georgia. Not for as long as she’s here.
Einstein was allegedly obsessed with light. I remember this, because I watched some random documentary about him when I was like ten and this detail has never left my brain.
This recollection kept circulating through my thoughts, yesterday, as I sat through an astronomy lab about the way light interacts with matter. We squinted at rainbows for two hours, through ancient lab equipment. We played around with convex lenses and concave mirrors. We played with light.
Six feet apart, wearing masks across our faces… it all still felt hushed and hurried and tense.
The study of light is not the first thing that I would’ve thought of, when thinking about the study of planets and solar systems and galaxies. But maybe it should’ve been.
On some clear night, after darkness settles… look up.
What do you see?
Stars, you might answer. As many stars as there are grains of sand on all the beaches in the entire fucking world.
Here’s the thing. The only reason that we know the stars exist at all is because of their light. Their light, which has literally traveled as fast as anything in the universe can travel, through empty space, sometimes for longer than there has been life on earth. Those same photons brush tiny mechanisms housed within our eyes, which sends a signal to our brains. Those same photons. That same light.
And that’s how we know the stars exist. That’s how we know the universe is there. Because of the way that light moves and interacts with everything it encounters.
One day I will fucking put this shit in book. I’ll wrap it up inside a story.
I just think that should be a thing.
I don’t understand why people think religion and science can’t coexist. I don’t care if all of this just randomly fucking happened, unfolded on the basis of dry chance. If I was going to worship anything, it would probably be this. Because it’s fucking beautiful.
So we have to understand how light works, because that’s where almost all of our information about the universe comes from. We have to be able to build models and predictions, interpret data, to get at the nature of things.
And it’s more than just the light we can see. There’s an entire electromagnetic spectrum available to us, stretching from gamma rays to radio waves, from ultraviolet to infrared. And it’s all up there, even if we can’t see it.
Sometimes, with the right tools, we can.
Not the same thing, but Galileo used two concave lenses to discover Jupiter’s moons. So there’s something.
I used two concave lenses to make a smiley face on a whiteboard appear slightly closer to me, and also upside down.
Within the spectrum of visible light, different wavelengths correspond with different colors. Squinting at a tube full of helium gas, through a tiny lense in an awkwardly heavy device, we could see the full spectrum, each wavelength fading into the next so you couldn’t quite tell where one color ended and another began.
I’m not entirely sure that I passed this lab.
The equipment was kind of terrible, even if it did let me see things i wouldn’t usually be able to see. Or maybe I just had a hard time understanding how to use it. Maybe it was both. It was hard to focus and keep track of all the information and it was late and I was tired and I still haven’t really learned how to ask for help when I don’t know what’s going on.
So I fudged my way through it. By the end of two hours, it was very not perfect, incomplete in some places, messy and generally terrible.
I felt horrible.
Horrible for not being good enough to do well, in something that I thought was so wonderful. I think that’s part of why I was sad.
And somehow it mattered, next to the stars.
Fuck it, at least there were rainbows.
I hope it’s a good Wednesday. Some of these nights, look up. 🌙
In which I touch on politics, again. I keep coming back to this.
As I listen to the impeachment trial in the Senate, on the radio, I am reminded of a handful of things.
I am reminded of what it felt like to live through this experience. As I hear those same audio clips, I am reminded of how violated I felt. How upsetting it was. How I couldn’t stop thinking about the beginning of A Handmaid’s Tale. About how badly I wanted to hear from everyone I loved to make sure they were okay, in case something bad happened to them.
I am reminded of how shaken I was…
I am reminded of all of the time it took my nervous system to even begin to process what it felt like to live through an attempted coup and an incident of domestic terrorism.
I’m reminded of how funny it was for me to realize how much it mattered to me that nothing bad happened to the government of this country when I spend a fair amount if time criticizing her for her flaws.
Like, yeah. Things need to change. But not like this, and not in this direction. Please.
I’m reminded of how much of a shock it was, after the fact, for me to realize how many people could believe something so strongly when it wasn’t true. I am still reeling and trying to process this reality.
They only believe in things so strongly based on what they understand about the world combined with what they are being told.
I had this moment when I realized that – even if my politics are on the complete opposite end of the spectrum – I am also vulnerable to this kind of manipulation.
Witnessing mob extremism from the other side of the spectrum made me seriously take a step back from everything that I believe in, and assess how much of my belief is genuinely accurate and in line with my fundamental values. It made me question those fundamental values. It made me stop and think about how media and social media influence my beliefs. It gave me that much pause.
What happened at the Capitol made me not want to be part of an ideology anymore, even a comparatively sound ideology, because I don’t want to give away my capacity to think critically and disagree with groupthink. I want to hang onto my capacity to think for myself. I need my conscience to be in my own hands, I need my agency to belong to me and not be at the whim of a mass conviction that is not true.
If it could happen to them, it could happen to me, too. If they could be wrong, then I could be wrong, too.
I was so shaken by this moment in history. Shaken. Shook. So fucking shook. It brought out all my skepticism and all of my doubt and all of my uncertainty.
I feel quite proud that after a lot of reflection, not much about what I believe in has changed. There are absolutely some things that need my attention, and that’s clearer to me, now. I’m grateful for the incentive to take some time to reflect, because the path forward is looking clearer than ever, now.
After what happened… if anything, I feel like what I believe in is more important now than it’s ever been.
Things like integrity and acceptance, like thinking about things in context, like knowing how to listen, like a commitment to growth. Compassion, humility, knowing how to walk in somebody else’s shoes, not taking things too personally, recognizing flaws and trying to address them, seeing how the world is deeply flawed and loving it anyway and trying to find a way to heal it…
Those things have value for a world that’s actively dying, for a world that is still unhealed from a deeply traumatic history that’s still playing out.
These things matter.
it’s just taken me a good long while to begin to feel that centered in my convictions and beliefs again.
Like – fuck.
There’s a difference between fighting to overthrow a government in the interest of holding onto power, and fighting for the kind of social change that will help as many people as possible.
Your extreme intolerance is different from my recognition of the need for more equity in the world. Your hunger for power and money and influence is different from my willingness to stand up for social change, my wish to do right by everyone, no matter who they are or where they’re coming from.
There is a difference between right and wrong.
Yes, there is a grey area. No, probably there is never going to be a universal standard of morality that works for everyone. We’re always going to disagree on things. Trying to force things to be otherwise is foolish.
But there are some things that are objectively right and true and just and good
and having an intolerant madman who rejects empirical evidence incite violence and uses mindfuckery to try to stay in power after he was voted out
***was not fucking one of those things.***
This event in history has left a mark on me, and on all of us.
And as we go forward from this moment, I hope we go forward with integrity. I don’t dare to have very much hope about this, at least in terms of what happens in the Senate.
I cherish what little hope I’ve got.
I care about the world that exists around you, all of the ways that it could be doing a better job supporting you through the hardest times. That is a tiny fraction of what I mean when I say that I love you.
I hope you’re feeling okay, and I hope it’s a good night.
I don’t like driving back and forth to school in the dark, for this one class. There’s this one intersection where my nervous system is convinced that I’m going to die, every time. I hold my breath as I drive across it.
I go carefully.
In spite of the risk of COVID-19, I enjoy sitting in class with other humans. I am reminded that there’s a side of me that surfaces, in a room full of people, which dearly likes to entertain. In a room full of people, I may or may not end up saying things which are accidently hilarious. No idea where this comes from, because for years of my life I was pure awkwardness with nothing to say that could make anybody laugh. Even just over break, I’d forgotten that I could do this. It feels nice.
It’s terrifying, because there are like ten college students in one room and I don’t know how careful any of them are. But it’s also good, at the same time.
Driving home in the dark, I turn up the music. Katy Perry announces that she’s wide awake, over and over again. I am, too. Lewis Capaldi’d gotten “used to being someone you loved,” and I like that song because I can harmonize in that little slice of tenor range that is sometimes available to me.
I don’t especially love these songs. I just need something to drown out the creepy feeling of driving alone in the dark.
I think putting something between yourself and the empty silence rushing past outside is acceptable.
Still, when I got home I had to unclench my jaw, and sit on my toes, to thaw them.
I haven’t left the house to go anywhere in a long time. This felt strange. It felt odd to be in a building that wasn’t my parents’ house, to get lost in the stairways and the double doors.
It’s so strange to live in this time. It’s strange to cover our faces, and even stranger that nowadays an unfamiliar unmasked face looks naked, like there’s something wrong.
It’s strange to worry this much about going out into the world and living.
I don’t think I’ll take that kind of thing for granted for a long time. Not when this clears up – when it does – and not for a long time after. I think every time I leave the house without a mask I’ll feel like I’m forgetting something. I think every time I’m standing beside someone, closer than six feet will feel too close.
(tune in next week for another episode of “is this worldwide pandemic potentially traumatic??”)
To be continued.
Anyway. Yesterday took a lot out of me. Leaving the house at all was tough.
Today I’m lucky – I get to stay home, boiling eggs and drinking coffee, reviewing German cases, learning about Kepler’s third law and the mathematics of elliptical orbits. It’s good to move through the world like this.
But I’m tired.
Soo tired.
Reading Braiding Sweetgrass is like having a piece of summer in your pocket that you can take out and look at whenever you need it. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys connecting to that feeling.
I’ve also been listening to songs from Danielle Ponder & the Tomorrow People. It’s beautiful music.
Last night I turned off my phone and stayed up late reading a book for the first time in what seems like a long time. Taking the time to make a dent in my ever-growing TBR pile feels like a good thing, even though I keep telling myself that I don’t really have time.
This time, book is Braiding Sweetgrass. The author is Robin Wall Kimmerer. The first chapters are about an indigenous creation story, about the mysterious synchronousity of pecan fruiting seasons, about picking wild strawberries as a child in upstate New York.
I picked strawberries, as a child, in upstate New York. That was a good time.
This morning I am slowly but steadily working through all of the Astronomy work that I get to do. I learned today that there are spots on the surface of the sun which are three times the diameter of the earth. I genuinely cannot wrap my brain around this kind of scale, and I am reminded of that one Douglas Adams quote about space being… big. Like, really big. The exact words are escaping me in this moment, but some of you might actually remember them.
These labs are tricky. If I get a C in this class, I’ll be okay with that. And I haven’t felt this way about anything in academia in a long time.
Just glad to be here.
After the Astronomy stuff there is the Art History stuff. This is straight up general education, and honestly it could go a handful of different ways. I could just plow through it and get it done without slowing down enough to take any of it in. I could probably do things this way and still get a good grade.
But, since I’m here…
I’m just trying to remember that time when I was lucky enough to walk through the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, with a cousin and a woman from Morocco that we met that morning at the hostel. I’m trying to channel that feeling into this classwork. If I remember correctly there were some actual tears.
More goes into art than paint and canvas. There’s a human element. This is just another medium for storytelling, if you’re paying attention. And stories are powerful things.
General education feels like a good place for me to be visiting right now. Like it’s – centering, to try new things. To push myself in a different direction. It helps me to practice being open to things that are just a little bit random. They inform my brain that there is more out there in the world than the handful of things that I struggle with, the weight of things that seem impossibly wrong.
There is more, out there in the world. More than you can ever possibly be aware of. And some of it is beautiful. And a whole lot of it genuinely matters.
I’m sitting cross legged on a rolled up yoga mat on the floor of my attic bedroom. There is an ancient laptop that looks a bit like a tank, open in front of me. It used to be my dad’s, I think? Like. Thousands of years ago. But it still works, and that’s all I really need.
In order to run the next online lab for my Astronomy class, I need to download the most recent version of Excel. I haven’t actually done this before, so we’re teaching ourselves how. On the spot. If I don’t figure out how to do this by tomorrow, then I won’t be able to work on this lab, which would suck. Royally.
This is fine, I can totally figure out how to do this.
Meanwhile I am so glad that I randomly decided to take Astronomy as a general education credit. It’s so cool.
Last week we downloaded a program called Celestia and got to take a simulated tour of the fucking universe. It was beautiful, and fascinating, and the scale of things puts life into perspective.
The universe is 13.8 billion years old. If you were to compress all of that time down into the span of a single year, all of human history would fit into the last 30 seconds of December 31st.
I’m sitting cross legged on a rolled up yoga mat on the floor of my attic bedroom, just south of a little town full of right wing religious conservatives who like to play golf. The town is situated in amoung a few lakes scratched north to south across the landscape, as by the fingers of an enormous hand. The lakes are situated in the upper righthand side of a continent that takes up a wide swath of a northern hemisphere of a roughly spherical planet that is mostly covered with water. The planet is hurtling in circles around a flaming ball of heat and light. This solar system of which my planet is a part is about two thirds of the way out from the center of a galaxy, populated will billions of similar stars.
If the sun was the size of a grapefruit and was situated in Washington DC, then the nearest other sun/grapefruit would be somewhere out in California.
On this scale, the earth is roughly the size of the tip of a ball point pen.
Philosophy says that there is no way to verify the objective nature of reality other than to start at this place where most of our subjective realities appear to overlap pretty well, and go from there.
Science says that even though it might be impossible to fully understand everything in the time that’s been given us, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try.
And the latest fucking version of fucking Excel is taking fucking forever to download, in my little attic bedroom, and somehow, miraculously, this matters.
It’s astounding.
Somehow it’s possible to feel happiness when one book out of millions of books is written. Somehow it’s possible to feel a hundred complicated feelings, listening to the words Malcolm X. Somehow it’s possible to be warm in the confines of a wooden house and freeze your ass off out in the snow when life is so impossibly unlikely in this cosmos and it’s beautiful
And I like it here.
From my attic to your place, wherever that might be, I hope it’s a good Monday.
Guess who just impulsively did a thing and now has bangs for the first time in seven years… 🙃
I like my hair right now. It’s this light red/purple color and there are bangs up there and it feels good. Also it isn’t currently shaped like a mullet, which is something.
also I look like a girl?? At the moment?? And it’s Not Terrible? Is this okay? Should I roll with it or try to fight it? what do I do
asdfghjkl;
This is fine. This is totally fine. I’m a randomly shaped glob of electric meat and bones, with hair and fingernails and stomach acid, living on a ball of dirt that’s circling a ball of flaming gas that is 2/3rds of the way out from the middle of a disc-shaped galaxy floating through predominately empty space
I can have purple hair and bangs if I fucking feel like it.
Stop for a second. Take a deep breath. Relax your shoulders, unclench your jaw. Breathe.
There.
I have an hour to just write. I don’t know if I need all of this time, but I’m going to play with some stream of consciousness stuff and see what happens.
A thing happened this morning.
Usually when I wake up in the morning I wake up in a state of obsessive rumination. Like my first moments of half-consciousness are saturated with anxiety spirals. I notice myself scrutinizing every memory and thought for things that are wrong with me, ways that I’ve fucked up, evidence that I am not lovable or loved.
The heaviest things to carry come from the inside. For me.
Once I’ve gotten out of bed and started to actually do things, it often gets better. But the thoughts follow me around, catch me at the least expected moments, when I’m least prepared to deal with them head on.
I often feel helpless.
I did not fully notice this pattern about waking up ruminating until a few days ago. I happened to stumble on a well articulated post in which someone was describing a similar experience, and something clicked.
The post was a reminder that even when it feels like we’re helpless, we’re often not.
When I woke up this morning, I remembered about the pattern. And I tried to remember that I am not completely helpless, even when it feels like I am.
I noticed the thoughts as they showed up.
They are almost all familiar and repetitive. I know them very well. I know what they’re going to say before they get a chance to land on me. I have this one advantage.
This morning, I didn’t fight them. I didn’t argue with them. That would’ve been too much work.
I just looked at them, and wrapped them up in a box, and wrapped a scarf around the box, and tied a string around the scarf, and tucked a flower under the string, and put the wrapped box in a drawer, and locked the drawer, and put the key in my pocket.
And I took a deep breath.
Not right now. I don’t need this right now. This is not helping me. These thoughts are only thoughts, that’s all the are. I don’t have to engage with this bullshit, now.
Noticing the pattern and having some idea of what was coming, combined with the reminder from some random post on the internet that I am not helpless, was useful to me.
Maybe some of these thoughts are worthy of my attention. I think there are some ways that I’m out of integrity with everything, and I think those are the things that deserve to be taken to heart and worked on.
But I think most of the anxiety spirals that come back to haunt me on a regular basis are actually just a stressed out nervous system… doing its best, but also getting things wrong, all the time.
What else should I expect?
What else should I expect from a body made of stardust, from an accident of physics, from something so improbable as consciousness and life in a universe like this one? Every time a body gets sick or dies, it’s a reminder that even though we’re impossibly beautiful and strong, we’re also finite and fragile and imperfectly designed. We can be both at the same time. And that’s okay.
So I don’t blame my nervous system for getting things wrong, for fixating on things that don’t matter. It’s a flaw, but we all have those. This is as good a time as any for compassion.
I think it’s important for me to understand that not ruminating first thing in the fucking morning isn’t negligence of anything important. It isn’t avoidance of something that I’m responsible for fixing.
It’s really just fucking okay to have boundaries and not engage with things when it doesn’t make sense to do so. And some of the most important boundaries exist inside the self.
This morning I woke up and thought of a handful of the best memories of a couple of my friends. I thought about a character from a TV show. I thought about an ethical dilemma from a book I’m reading for class and I let it bother me, I let it get well and truly under my skin, because it belongs there.
And then I got up and put on a t-shirt and jeans and put my hair up and out of my face and went downstairs for some coffee, and I said good morning to my dad. And the day unfolded from there.
This might have been one moment of strength among thousands of moments of not being able to fend off the bullshit. This might have been one good day, not the beginning of a good stretch. I don’t know what’s coming, and it scares me.
Right now I’m sitting that one down, for a while. And I’m going to go to class. My hour is almost up.
Thank you for seeing me, just seeing me, and for not running away.
I get to take ethics this semester and I’m happy because I really needed to take this class.
It’s an opportunity to think and talk and read and write about right and wrong. It’s a chance to develop and grow and work out how best to decide which thing is the right thing to do. It’s a chance to work out how to think about the niggling existential questions, to reflect on the natures of rightness and wrongness.
It’s a chance to do all of those things in the safety of a structured space. This space exists apart from the internet community of strangers, apart from the overwhelming prospect of entering into this kind of work alone.
It’s just a college class. But I’ve seen pretty amazing work happen in college classes. I’ve seen names change, I’ve seen confidence blossum, I’ve seen people realize that they could do things that they didn’t think they could. One well timed anthropology unit when I was 18 changed the way I think about gender things, for always. Those insights landed when I really needed them and I’m so glad that they let you keep that kind of thing after you graduate. Because it left a mark on me.
So I feel hopeful about what this ethics class could help me to work through and process. I spend a lot of time thinking about this material in my own life, because I think it’s important, but the way I think through things isn’t always helpful. I think thinking about these things in the context of a class could be good for me.
Also, my professor isn’t shy about where he stands in terms of what he thinks right and wrong look like in society. And the perspectives that he wasn’t at all shy about sharing on the first day of class made me feel particularly safe.
He’s a grandfatherly person from Italy. He didn’t put his perspectives into the same words that people use on the internet. But the words didn’t matter, the way the ideas were expressed didn’t matter, because underneath the words, there was belief that seemed much stronger and more real.
When you’re in philosophy, you spend a lot of time challenging your most cherished beliefs. And when you’ve challenged your beliefs for many years, the handful of things that you’ve got left combined with all the things you’ve accumulated in time are pretty fucking special.
Wish I had more elders in my life.
I needed this class so much, lol.
And I needed to write this, this morning.
I need some coffee and a book. Love you. Hope it’s a good morning 🙏 🌄
For a while in there I was feeling nervous about going back. Ever since I decided to take a gap year, my relationship to being a student has felt different. I feel like I have to work harder than everybody else, since I took so much time away. Even though I was successful in my first semester back, I can’t shake this feeling that I don’t truly belong in the world of academia in the same way that I used to.
So it’s strange, knowing that there are going to be classes again.
I had such a nice break. It didn’t go by too fast, but it didn’t stretch on forever, either. I worked some things out. It isn’t linear, but I feel like I’m giving myself the space that I need for growth to happen. And it’s going to be alright.
Anyway.
I get to take a class about ethics, and another class about how knowledge doesn’t exist. Which is…
…going to bother me, I can feel it.
After about a week of everything being online, I’m stuck having to go on campus for one hour twice a week. I worked very hard to rearrange things so that I could learn online completely, but because of stupid arbitrary parameters reasons, it didn’t work out for me. I think it’s still going to be okay.
Fortunately, perfect attendance is no longer a priority during a pandemic. If I need to take some time and just stay home from this one class I have to take, that door is open. I’ll just have to work a little harder on my own to keep up with things. And working a little harder on my own is something that I know that I can do.
Otherwise, everything is happening through this rectangular blue screen, through a tiny symbol shaped like radio waves. Everything is happening in this chilly, narrow attic room, at a little round table with fake leather chairs. I’ll be studying in my own space, surrounded by rag rugs and crocheted blankets, beeswax candles and dried flowers, and a tabby cat.
I like this space. It could be worse.
I hope to do better in this semester of college than I’ve ever done in my life. It might be tricky, under the circumstances. But if I give things the regular amount of effort under a harder than usual set of circumstances… you can see where that could go.
So I hope to do well. Will do my best, which actually does count for something.
There are a lot of things in the world that deserve that kind of care and attention. I’m not entirely convinced that school is necessarily the one that should get most of my energy in that regard, but also I’m not too far away from being done.
I think that a lot of that energy could do really transformative things if I was able to focus it outwards and send it into this world. I have a only a vague picture of where I want to focus on, specifically. It’s frustrating, to not have that clarity. But it’s getting a little clearer over time.
I used to train my body so that I could race in the relay races and the mile, every spring. I used to be pretty good at it.
The entire purpose of training every day behind the school was to push our physical bodies to the very edge, to push beyond our limits, to grow stronger.
Four years of training in this way left a mark on me, a certainty that growth is possible even and especially when you’re willing to experience profound discomfort on a regular basis in order to get to that place.
When I can’t bring myself to push to the brink of my endurance for pain, I feel as though I am not trying hard enough to figure out where my edges are.
It’s just one of those things in life that sticks with you.
It has been four years since the last time I ran that mile.
And still, every time I put up a boundary, it feels fundamentally weak. Every time I recognize my limited nature and decide to rest, instead of challenging myself to go beyond my limits, I feel like I’m not working hard enough. I feel like I could be doing more.
And then instead of feeling genuinely good about the compassion I try to offer myself, I end up feeling frustrated and a little sad.
I am frustrated by my finite-ness, my limits. I wish I was so much more than I am, and I wish I had more to give.
I can’t shake this feeling that if only I worked harder, and if only I cared more, I could become stronger.
I can’t shake the feeling that if only I was stronger I would have so much more to give.
But instead I feel weak. Like I don’t have that much to offer the world. Like my limits are holding me back, shoving me down, sitting on my chest so that I can’t get up. It feels like my edges are keeping me from being able to love and be loved, being able to work, being able to fully exist.
And I’m not done grieving.
Fire helps. The smell of baking bread helps. The sensation of beeswax in the palm of my hand helps. Doing laundry helps. Walking helps, breathing in lungfulls of cold air. Listening to voices laughing and sharing thoughts, and listening to fucking sea shanties, and feeling the weight of a paperback book, getting lost in the pages… these things help to center me as I grieve the fact that I am not unlimited.
I wish I could be doing more.
I wish I was that strong.
I just feel tired.
I hope that you’re holding up well, today. Love you.
A conversation which culminated in the phrase “clams absolutely enjoy folk music”
The acquisition of a book called The Wizard of Earthsea
A really excellent breakfast sandwich
A moment of clear headedness, when I was driving and singing along to the radio
Some time spent purposefully rearranging the clutter in my room. It feels ever so slightly better in there.
Laundry that is now folded and put away
Two episodes of MHA
News about a beautiful book that’s coming out soon.
Good things that haven’t happened yet today but are going to happen, soon, because I’m intentionally moving all the necessary matter and energy around:
Mug of hot tea
Shower in the dark
Nap
Online meeting that will hopefully open some doors for me.
I am trying to remember to count all the things, to pull myself back into balance.
A couple of hours ago, I was sitting outside in the loft of the barn. Everything was calm, quiet and still and cold, covered in snow. And my head was quiet, too.
In that moment, I felt better than I have in a long time. More at peace. Clear headed.
And then I got up. I went back to the house, and then there were other people around me. There was noise and conflict and discomfort, echoing in the walls.
I’ve been trying, recently, to notice how absurd it all is. All the conflict. If you look at it that way, it’s – well, it’s actually almost funny.
But once I’d come inside and landed, the peaceful feeling started to fade. And I missed it.
There is so much to carry.
Do you ever cry for no good reason, when you know that nobody is watching?
There doesn’t have to be a good reason.
Sometimes, sadness just is.
And I don’t have to go looking for the triggers or the trauma. I don’t have to go looking for somebody to blame, and I don’t have to go looking for something that’s wrong with me. I don’t have to shove this feeling into a box labeled “cognitive disorders,” in big black letters on the side.
Sometimes, my breathing is just heavy for a moment, and my eyes well up, and my throat closes down, and I don’t have to know why.
A thought is just a thought. That’s all it is, so it doesn’t have to be true.
I’m always trying to sift through the universe and try to understand things. But, generally, just when I think I’ve gotten close to grasping onto a Thing that makes absolute sense, it tends to slip through my fingers. Like sand.
I wonder why this is so difficult. I look to other people, people who speak in absolutes, people who present themselves with confidence, and I wonder what makes them different from me.
Have they figured something out that I haven’t, yet? Or am I just brave enough to admit that I don’t understand, where most people see cluelessness as a weakness that must be concealed?
I feel like it’s never just one reason.
In the very earliest days of philosophy, great thinkers were often spectacularly incorrect about the nature of the universe. This did not stop them from spending a great deal of time trying to get nearer to the truth.
Since nobody actually knew what was going on, there was this whole mess of different ideas about how the world worked, where it came from, what it was made of. Everybody had a slightly different perspective.
Often, thinkers influenced one another’s thoughts. They could either adopt pieces of other perspectives, or they could be critical of other viewpoints and reject the pieces that didn’t make sense in favor of their own propositions. Usually, both of these things happened.
Sometimes you had thinkers who lived far away, on other continents. You had thinkers who were isolated on islands and surrounded by lots of other people who didn’t enjoy philosophy very much.
The isolated philosopher would invent new ideas, untouched by the influence of others.
When many different ideas formed in far away places came together for the first time, there was often quite a lot of bickering about who was right.
Wars have been fought over this shit.
But sometimes, rarely, people who believe different things and have different cultures learn how to live side by side and respect one another’s existence. They learn a little, from each other, too.
Wish this would happen more often than it does.
Even in the midst of all of the bickering, there were some people who stuck with one of the basic tenants of philosophy, which is an odd mix of critical thinking and compromise.
Here is something a philsopher might say:
“Even as I recognize the excellent elements of an idea, it’s also up to me to look at it critically and work out what doesn’t make sense. It’s up to me to either consider alternative perspectives or come up with my own alternatives. And then it’s up to me, informed as I am by two or more perspectives, to decide what I think is approximately true.”
We’re probably never going to be able to grasp the truth in its entirely because we’re fundamentally limited, and we don’t an infinite amount of time.
But this shouldn’t stop us from trying.
It shouldn’t stop me from trying.
I don’t want to devote my entire life to thinking like this, because it is exhausting. I don’t want to fill up my head with the purpose of life or the nature of the gods.
But also… knowing how to think this way has value. It’s applicable in every aspect of my life. Whereever there is discomfort, whereever two apparently opposing things are trying to coexist, knowing how to think like this is useful.
Right now I’m trying to apply this way of thinking to my own political perspectives. I’m trying to decide if I can call myself an activist in good faith. I see so much value in the insights from the left, but there’s also – cult thinking, and narrow-mindedness, and pressure to respond to everything in a very specific way.
And I need to figure out how to adopt the things I belive to be really quite excellent without absorbing the things that feel toxic and wrong.
I believe there is a way to do this. Thinking for myself, trusting myself, not giving too much of my power away feels like a good place to start. I am also borrowing open-ended question asking, from my experience as a tutor, and adding that the list of things that might help me in this process.
The world is unfinished, still raw and rough and a bit wobbly, and there are deep scars in so many places. It needs work. It needs healing. Even in my lowest moments, when I feel sooo far away from being good enough, I still want to help.
And I want to help in a way that doesn’t completely flatten me. I’m still afraid of being uncomfortable. While I’m willing to stretch, I need to make sure I don’t break.
I have some of the tools that I need in order to do this work in my pockets. And it’s comforting.
Two memes were circulating, late in the evening, on the night when 46 took office.
The first was the image of Bernie Sanders at the inauguration. He appears in his infamous grey jacket and knitted mittens, sitting with his arms folded. To me, he looks something adjacent to dejected and sad. Which is somewhat heartbreaking, actually.
Many have pointed out that he appears to be wearing the same grey jacket he wears in that one other meme. You know the one. With the snow??
Anyway. Bernie’s image has been gleefully photoshopped into a variety of other photographs, from other times and places, to the general benefit of everybody.
Bernie is everywhere.* Archeologists from the future are going to have an interesting time with that one.
*except in the Whitehouse, which is horrible.**
**tentative Jungian shrink analysis – the entire collective unconscious is feeling the loss of an alternative parallel universe outcome in which Bernie Sanders took that oath of office. And we’re creating memes because we’re using humor to cope with the fucking grief.
I adore you, Bernie Sanders. I appreciate your vision for this nation and her people, I am so grateful for the way you have fought and continue to fight for our well being, and I wish you had been our 46th president. I’m so glad you exist.
Also, I love those mittens, and I want to know where they came from and who made them.
…okay I looked it up because I had to know…
According to the internet, they were a handmade gift from a teacher named Jen Ellis, from Essex Junction, Vermont, who has since been inundated with requests from people who are trying to buy them. They are made from repurposed wool sweaters and lined with fleece made from recycled plastic bottles. Ellis gifted them to Sanders 2+ years ago and was surprised when he started wearing them on his campaign trail.
So glad you wore them to the inauguration because now they are famous. As they should be. They are great.
The second circulating meme is the collective realization that John Mullaney’s figurative horse has, officially, left the hospital.
Hank Green went on the record and said that, yeah, if a horse left a hospital after four years of causing havoc in there, it would absolutely make sense to take a minute to celebrate.
But after the celebrations were done, it’d be time to clean up the place and get on with the business of helping people. Because it’s a fucking hospital, and that’s what hospitals are meant to do.
This analysis hits differently in the middle of a pandemic.
It’s honestly time to clean up the place get on with the business of helping people, my loves.
I hope you woke up feeling like a weight had been lifted. I hope you read that list of the 17 executive orders that Biden signed last night. I hope you let out a breath you’ve been holding for four excruciatingly long years.
You know… when I woke up this morning, I just… it genuinely felt like Christmas.
And I don’t like ceremonies. I don’t always love speeches.
But I did tune into Biden’s inauguration ceremony, today. I listened to those speeches, and those prayers, and those poems. This time around it was important.
I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of a café, in the sun. The wife sat across from me in her own vehicle, parked next to mine. We had the windows down. My car radio was loud enough for both of us.
We got $5 socially distant celebratory bread bowls, full of soup. And we listened.
I saw Obama fist bump Harris. I witnessed this moment in history. Her story.
I heard Biden’s call for unity. And I genuinely wanted to know how many times he said that word in the course of his speech, lol.
As I listened to Biden’s words, I was reminded of the apparent paradox of tolerance. How can a person practice tolerance for everybody, when the set that is everybody includes the incredibly intolerant?
I think of that meme with the white person with the guns and the c*nfederate flag and the sw*stika tattoos, standing next to the person of color with the turban or the blue hair or the pansexual flag or the tie-died jumper, and the caption that says “why can’t we all just be friends…”
I wonder how to honor a call for unity, if there’s a line in the sand that is so vast and old and impossible to cross.
It’s hard.
As I reflect on Biden’s words today, I realize the way that his words contrast with the sentiments of his predecessor.
I remember that the fundamental message, from the highest tier of authority, in one of the most powerful countries in the world, for four years, has been one of extreme hatred, rudeness, division, unkindness, bigotry, intolerance, and negligence.
And while that chapter is going to leave deep scars, it’s over, for right now. The hatred and corruption that 45 reflected and magnified existed before his time and will go on existing after it, but his time is done.
I feel comforted that the first words from this administration were words of kindness and hope and acceptance, of pattern recognition, and science, and reverence, and duty, and an understanding of the gravity of loss.
Fuck. I haven’t cried all day, but my eyes are welling up as I write this.
Hard to know where to begin, with unity.
Recognize the humanity in the people who are around you. Know that their fundamental worth is untouched by their actions and beliefs. No matter how abhorrent they might seem to you, no matter how objectively wrong they may have been or continue to be.
The person across from you had a mother, is capable of suffering, and is going to die one day, just like everybody else. Remember that, as you navigate the community of humans. Amoung family and strangers. In person and online.
It might not be unity, but it’s somewhere to begin. It’s a starting line.
The name of the poet at the inauguration ceremony today was Amanda Gorman. She is 22. This makes her one year older than I am.
I want to remember this. I was moved by her words.
I hope you felt this relief, today. And I love you.
Today (yesterday?) I went for a walk in a graveyard with a friend. We masked up and talked for a while about politics and books. I can often hold my own in those conversations.
Friend’s mum’s bee associates and chickens are responsible for more eggs and honey than she needs. I offered to turn some of the honey into mead.
We already have too many eggs, but I think I effectively communicated about the existence/premise of certain free food stands in the city as one possible place to share food with people who might appreciate it.
Take what u need, leave what u can…
Rochester has a plethora of mutual aid network / food redistribution nonprofits. It just feels like they’re collectively hurting a little for supply, but this also could be a seasonal thing.
Later in the evening I baked two loaves of bread. One tastes like oats and powdered milk. The other one has a distinctly sour yeast smell. Based on like three data points in an experiment with many uncontrolled variables, it seems like letting the dough proof for three days makes the best bread, so far.
A different friend sewed together the rag rug. I’m getting subtle Captain America vibes from this thing and I kind of like it:
Collapsed into bed and watched a little anime, decided it was time for sleep, turned out all the lights, and got caught in this impossibly uncomfortable half asleep place where I wasn’t quite resting but wasn’t quite concious enough to get up and move around. The plot from the episode I was watching as i drifted off was bouncing around inside of my head like an echo and I couldn’t feel my toes.
…hence the tea and blog post writing at one o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday.
Holy shit, guys, it’s inaugurf*ckingation day. We’re still in the very wee hours, but it’s here.
I hope that this day unfolds with an apt degree of grace.
There’s a certain charge in the air this week. A quiet expectation. Like the world is holding its breath. This tension is heightened by the aftershock of recent events, and by the numbness in the wake of 2020.
For one thing, western NY could be one football game away from collapse, if the Buffalo Bills don’t keep winning like this.
It’s always been strange to me that so many people could care so much for this team. They’ve been absolutely terrible, for all the years of my life. But there’s always been this stubborn pride and devotion, a faint memory of better times. It’s strangely hartening to see them do well, especially right now, especially as someone who realllyyy doesn’t care about sports.
This is the craziest time…
When I was younger, I used to read a lot of historical fiction. It always seemed odd that even as those characters lived through major historical events, they’d mostly be caught up with everyday life.
As I live through… this time in history, I think I’m beginning to understand.
I’ve been trying to keep myself distracted from the murmerings and rumblings of unrest. This doesn’t mean that I’m unaware of the state of the world, because I’m keeping one eye open. This doesn’t mean I’m pretending that everything’s fine, because it isn’t. I’m just aware that if I do not distract myself, I risk sinking into a dark and despairing emotional place where I’m of no use to anyone.
Instead of losing myself in this numb and shaken, feeling I’m going to:
write
go for a walk
make a cheesecake
read a book
bake some bread
cook food that looks pretty
go to the woods
listen to podcasts
take photographs
make soap
listen to sea shanties
shower
remember to eat
drink water
light candles
do laundry
clean up the kitchen
talk with some friends
These are the things that keep me centered and engaged and focused on what I’m doing with my hands and ears and eyes. Sounds and smells hold my attention. Even the sea shanties.*
*recently there has been a rise in the popularity of sea shanties. It’s because people started making covers of a song called Wellerman. I hope this is not a fad, and that it just becomes something that we carry forward with us into the future. Someday we can all get together and sing at the tops of our lungs:
Soon may the Wellerman come To bring us sugar and tea and rum One day, when the tonguin’ is done We’ll take our leave and go…
I’m looking forward to tuning into this inauguration. Looking forward to watching four years of – all of this shit – come to a close. But it’s going to be an interesting time, trying to pull things back into balance. I hope with everything I’ve got that nobody gets hurt. I hope that those who deny the outcome of this election will stay the fuck at home and be peaceful.
In this moment, when the relationship between society and the self is tenuous, I’m mostly not looking for new posts to share, new thoughts to think, new books to read. I’m not looking for more wokeness, even though awareness is important. There has been so much of that in the last year that I’m reaching the limit of what I can hold.
Intead of those things, I am looking for actions.
Not the actions of an activist, even though activism has value and I see this.
What I’m looking for is a way to volunteer. I don’t really know how to do this, but I’ve found a couple of places to begin, and they look promising.
I hope you are holding up well, this Sunday. Love you.
Heard on social media that somebody I liked from my parents’ church is no longer with us. I didn’t know him, but I always liked him, and this one is hitting me kind of hard. I know that he didn’t always have the easiest time, but I know that he also liked laughing.
It’s hard when you haven’t seen them in a long time, when you don’t know how they’ve been. When you’re going about your day as usual, worrying about small things that don’t matter except that they do, and then you catch a familiar name in the last sentence that anybody wants to hear.
It makes – everything – smaller. Like it matters so much less.
It doesn’t matter whether or not the bread rises. That kind of thing doesn’t matter, when a daughter lost her father or a partner just lost her other half.
It doesn’t matter if I can capture what I’m trying to say in words when somebody else is gone.
Just yesterday I was talking to a cousin and we both said that we hoped that everybody would get through this thing and come out the other side. It was a tough thing to wish for, because of how many people we’ve already lost, because of how much risk there is for the ones we love.
I’m not just talking about covid-19.
Almost a year ago, we stopped gathering together. Being together. Occupying the same space, being near to each other, breathing the same air.
Because we couldn’t.
And there’s been this hope, right, there’s been so much hope that there would be a time when things could go back to some semblance of normal. There’s been this hope that sometime eventually we could all be together again. That maybe we could dance.
But for some of us there won’t be a reunion. There are going to be empty chairs at the table, there are going to be voices missing from the conversations in the kitchen.
There are going to be friends might never speak to each other in the same laughing, companionable way again, because they drifted too far apart when they couldn’t get together, in order to keep one another’s families safe. It’s been a year, and that’s really hard.
But maybe I just don’t have enough faith. And maybe so long as two people are still alive and breathing, there is always hope for a time when they’re laughing together, again.
Still.
After this storm passes, there isn’t going to be any back to normal, and it hurts. So fucking much.
And we have to greive. We have to look that loss in the face. It’s a heavy loss, and it’s a difficult undertaking. But it’s no use pretending that this shit hasn’t gone down.
Sometimes all it takes is a big cry.
Sometimes people heal in other ways.
A short trip to the edge and back. Cat kisses and a bruised knee. New songs, sung by old familiar voices. A favorite pen. Excellent books. The cool side of a pillow. Water on your lips. A character from a video game. The sound of gravel cruching under your feet. Mud between your toes. Birds, crying.
Nobody should ever have had to be alone and greive the loss of knowing that nothing would ever really be the same again. Nobody should ever have had to realize the weight of that loss from a distance, isolated, by themselves.
Sometimes there’s nothing left to do but wait until the bread rises, and worry about small things like whether or not it’s going to or not.
I wish I could hug everyone in the universe, if they were down for that kind of thing.
I wish I could reach out and hold your hand.
But I’m stuck, here, behind a screen. I can be present and here and with you and also not, at the same time, and it’s strange and it does weird things to a human brain that’s used to connecting in person.
I know that someday the ones that are left will be able to step out into the world. And it’ll be different. And we’ll all have scars. But the ones that are left, for a little time, can be together in the sun. And it’ll seem alright.
A few years ago I took all of my old t-shirts from high school and I very unceremoniously went at them with a pair if scissors. I have very little recollection as to why.
I could no longer wear them, so I put them in a box under my bed and let the box gather dust and I forgot about the t-shirts, as I tried very hard to block out memories of high school. As one does.
Yesterday I took the tangled mess of mutilated fabric out from under the bed and cut it into strips. I knotted the strips together into longer strands, and then braided the strands together into a rope. When you coil the rope around in a spiral on a level plane, you might end up with something like a rag rug.
This afternoon I dropped off the rope at the home of a friend who has a sewing machine, and they’re going to transform the rope into a rug, for me.
The thing about rag rugs is that they can just keep growing. Forever. So long as there are more sacrificial t-shirts, bedsheets, scraps of fabric, the circular rug can increase in circumference until it extends to the edge of the world…
It feels good that I’ve done something with one of the boxes under my bed. It feels good to make some progress, and to create something.
As I handled this fabric, memories from high school flooded back. Some of them still make me nauseous. Others, I found… no longer had any power over me.
That felt good.
It’ll be nice to have somewhere for my feet to land when I step out of bed in the morning. Good to have something between me and the cool surface of a wooden floor.
“Stomp all over the memories,” my sister chimes in.
I know I haven’t written much about what happened at the Capitol, since that day. I think this is because I’m still sorting through it and trying to understand.
It seems like many people already know exactly how they feel about what happened, and the case is closed. I sure as hell know how I felt while it was happening. In retrospect I’m finding that I need a little time.
I reject the pressure to know exactly how to feel when things happen in the world around me. I need to do things in my own time.
The most recent wave of social media response – from activist communities, and from friends who are tuned into this kind of this – has been the most emotionally overwhelming social media event since what happened this summer. I guess the outrage in Louisville in the fall is one possible exception.
This kind of emotional surge through social media affects me and my nervous system in a way that is fucking profound.
I physically shake. It gets hard to breathe. It also gets hard to think, and be discerning about what is actually an appropriate way to respond to this.
I know that nothing can “make” me feel a certain way. I know that I am responsible for my own emotions, actions.
But I also know that my human nervous system probably did not evolve to be able to process events in the world that exist on this kind of scale.
So if I’m not careful, this kind of interconnected emotional surge can pick me up and carry me away. It happened this summer, for sure, and I’m still not through with processing what happened to me then.
I am speaking for myself, and nobody else. Comparing my experience to those of other people doesn’t really make sense right now.
But I imagine I’m not the only person who goes through this. I imagine everyone processes that shaken feeling in a different way.
Some people emotionally react in a way that is productive. Hats off to them for the work that they do in the world.
Even though reacting emotionally is almost always my first impulse, I think that when I react emotionally I actually become less useful, to everybody around me.
This time, instead of reacting, instead of speaking out, I’ve been trying to give my nervous system time to adjust. I’ve been trying to give myself room to process before I do anything.
I’m doing more listening than speaking. When I share things online I’ve been trying to share articles from news outlets that I consider to be reputable instead of tweets and opinion pieces.
One of the things I did share was an article from the Guardian comparing the police response to the protests in June to the police response to the attack on the Capitol, in pictures. Photographs. Because it said so much, without saying a word.
Even though there is much about this situation that I can’t control, I have been following updates about this very closely. I get most of my news about this from the Guardian and from NPR.
I do this because I feel a personal responsibility to keep myself relatively well informed and in the loop about this.
This is my effing country and she’s deeply fucked up but I sure as hell care about what happens to her. So I’ll be damned if I don’t want to know how she’s doing.
I want to emphasize that this outlook is not necessarily something that is right for everyone at this time. Taking time to disconnect and rest, taking time to not engage, might actually be the best way, for some of us.
Not engaging with something in any given moment does not equate to not caring. Other voices might say otherwise, but I stand by this with all of my heart.
I see people shaming other people in the comments sections of Instagram posts for asking “wait, what is this about?” I see people yelling at other people for not educating themselves. “Google is right there at your fingertips,” people yell at each other in frustration. And they say other things, worse things, to each other.
There are so many reasons that a person might not know the things that you learned a few hours ago. Taking one’s anger out on people in the comments section on the internet is not actually accomplishing very much. I dare to hold others to that standard.
This is a fundamentally traumatic time. For everyone.
I’m still processing.
I’m one hell of a lucky bastard. I have the luxury of a little time to process things.
And I feel grateful.
I hope that you are processing this in a way that is kind to yourself and to your system. I invite you to check in with yourself, about that thing.
I hope you’re holding up well on this Thursday, and I love you.
I’m just stepping into this space for like thirty seconds in order to tell you that I did finally get my laundry done and that I’m pretty fucking proud of myself.
I decided when I was driving today that I’m not going to let anyone else’s voice be my conscience anymore.
I don’t know if this is strange, but I do this very particular thing when I’m trying to decide if something is right or wrong, when I’m trying to sift through my own actions and decide if I’ve been a dumbass or if it’s more complicated than that.
When I’m in that thought space, I often think of another person. They’re usually someone I respect and look up to. Sometimes I’m close to them. Sometimes they’re someone that I’ve watched and thought about for a long time without letting them know. I almost always choose people who have better moral compasses, or better critical thinking and discernment skills, than me. Or at least I choose people who seem that way, from my perspective.
And then I let my own conscience have their voice. I put my compass in their hands. And I think “what would this person think of me if I accepted this belief, based on how it lines up with what I perceive to be their values.”
This has so many complicated layers that if it was a cake it would probably win prizes.
The thing is, I’m beginning to feel really fucking uncomfortable with how much power I’m giving away.
Because, first of all, I’m over here automatically making the assumption that another person knows better and has more of their shit together than I do when in all likelihood they actually don’t.
I’m not saying that I have my shit together, because I don’t have my shit together. What I am saying is that I’m not alone in that. Assuming that another person knows what they’re talking about just because I respect them is unfair. It’s unfair to my own capacity to think. And it’s also unfair to all of the things that this other person has lived though in order to form their own perspectives. It’s unfair to put messy and imperfect human people up on pedestals and think of them as having everything figured out. That is so much to carry.
Hell, it’s hard for me when my mother asks me for help figuring out how to use her iPhone. I have to put on this ridiculous aura of confidence in order to help her feel calm while she trusts me, as I fudge my way through trying to fix a problem that sometimes I actually don’t know how to fix. And I can’t imagine what would happen if that interaction suddenly had to do with an issue of some actual consequence.
Like racial injustice. Like governance of a nation, like dismantling historically broken systems. Like how to take action in the face of a mass extinction that doesn’t impact everybody in the same way.
Actually, I can imagine what that interaction is like, because we have had conversations about those things. And usually I get really wound up about it and she listens for a while. And she does her best in the face of this massive emotional/reactive charge that I have around these topics. But more often than not we end up butting heads and not being able to go on with the conversation.
My nervous system gets sooo fucked up, when I try to process things with this much charge around them. It’s a lot for another person to be around. Given the scope of the problems that I’m trying to process, I don’t blame my nervous system for not fucking knowing how.
Sometimes – and this is dangerous – my nervous system’s response to the things that are wrong in the world are mostly shaped by content on the internet. I spend hours staring into this rectangle of light, and I don’t get to just selectively take in only some of the things that I see in this space. That isn’t how it works.
Some of the shit out there is toxic, and it’s absorbed right along side of the voices raised for awareness and the empathy and the advocacy. The loudest voices on the internet are the ones that have captured the collective emotional charge around a thing, so that it’s shared and shared until it spreads like wildfire. Just because a point resonates with some emotional element of a topic, that doesn’t mean that it’s holistic, or right, or kind, or even true. And if I don’t filter through everything, critically, carefully, then I can wind up taking things to heart that don’t serve me at all. This is a something I have to navigate, even as my viewpoints are formed and shaped by the things I learn in these spaces. It’s complicated.
In all seriousness, some of the more toxic messages that I find in these spaces fuck with my own moral compass to a ridiculous extent. It’s like – it’s like holding a magnet near an actual compass. It throws me off, and I get so lost…
And so I can’t go on comparing my values with other peoples’ in order to to see if they line up perfectly. This applies to both my personal relationships and to my relationship to the things I see online.
This is not because I don’t care what people think, and it isn’t because I don’t value alternative perspectives, because I do. I do care. I especially care when it comes to the people that I respect and look up to and desperately want to be respected by. As much as people say that you shouldn’t care what people think, and fuck ’em if they have a problem with that… there is nothing wrong with wanting to be respected for who you are and what you believe.
I just need the things I believe to genuinely be my own beliefs, and not somebody else’s.
I’m tired of giving up my power of decernment in favor of my half-baked understanding of somebody else’s thoughts. It doesn’t matter if I end up coming to similar conclusions as other people have done, so long as I did the work to get there. If I find out that I’ve been working with basic assumptions that don’t make any sense, and I do end up changing my mind – then that’s an incredibly important shift. I can’t afford to be afraid or embarrassed if and when my opinions change.
In the end I think that I owe it to myself, and to other people, to think for myself and make up my own mind about things. Even and especially if those beliefs break the mold.
And that’s hard work.
This goes much deeper than citing my sources, deeper than making sure I’m staying in integrity with reputable information. This is deeply personal introspective shit.
I need my conscience to have my own voice.
I need to keep my moral compass in my own hands, because otherwise I’ll never know for sure which way she’s pointing.
Dude, I think my meds might be actually working. The inside of my head is quieter in this moment than it has been in years.
This afternoon my parents and I went out to see my aunt & uncle & my cousin. This was our outdoor socially distanced much belated Christmas, and it was a nice time.
We snagged burgers and milkshakes and onion rings at the Tom Wahl’s halfway between us. The elder generation swapped bottles of wine, and I recieved a book with old annotations in the margins.
Later, we walked down the trail that begins at the old railway bridge by the pasta plant. As we walked, we talked about death and dying, about science fiction and fantasy books and movies, about British TV shows.
I don’t know that I’m free to share the reason we talked about death and dying, but the conversation sure went to some interesting places.
Witches of the Discworld were referenced on multiple occasions – the ones who sit up with the dying and play Cripple Mr. Onion and lay out the bodies in the end. I talked about the first time I experienced death, when my dog was dying and I was 16 and my parents told me they wouldn’t help her go to sleep until I was ready to let go, and I was too young, and I didn’t let her go in time. We talked about hospice care, about the resilience of the people who do that work. We talked about the way people cling to any scrap of life that’s left, sometimes, and how hard it is for loved ones to let people go. We talked about pain, suffering, about the possibility of a difference between a murder and a difficult variety of kindness. We talked about the wish that more people could be somewhere comfortable and familiar in their last moments, instead of spending years in sterile plastic halls, trapped in places where they don’t want to be, like my Grandfather. I don’t know if it was insensitive, but we talked about the last things each person wanted to be aware of in this lifetime. One person says they want to smell baking cookies fresh out of an oven. I decide I’d like to smell the sulfurous smoke of a match that’s just been lighted and blown out. But I’m not too attached to that wish.
We talked about dying, and it was comforting to the person who needed to have that talk.
Later on I was met with incredulity and a tiny bit of lighthearted shaming when I said that I hadn’t read anything from Ursula Le Guin. Funnily enough, I have gotten similar reactions in conversations with every single person I have ever met and liked on Tinder, which I’ll grant you was all of two people, but that has nothing to do with my point. The priorities of the certain items on the reading list have been rearranged accordingly. I also might be borrowing some books.
I’m back in the car right now, and my toes are slowly thawing. Gradually finishing a milkshake.
This is why I’m so heavy on the “I love you” and the “drive safe” and the “let me know when you get home.” Because life is like this. Because there’s a pandemic raging. Because world is harsh on the ones who need the most compassion, and often they’re the strongest among us and we don’t see it. Because there’s an actual attempt at a coup unfolding before our eyes and ears, through the TV screens and the car radios. Because we knew that tensions were building, but this –
What has happened in Washington today extraordinary, and I didn’t really belive that it would.
So. I love you. I hope you and yours are safe, and if they’re not. I have a friend who lives 30 minutes from Washington and they’re okay.
I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m listening to the radio, drinking water, staring blankly into space. I notice after a while that my breathing is rapid and my throat is swollen and I’m not sure if I can actually move. I go outside and hula hoop in shorts and wellington boots for about five minutes and then force myself to get inside out of the cold.
I’m in my room now. With my cat. She’s purring. She doesn’t know what’s going on, how could she, but she’s here. And she knows I’m wound up, I believe. But she is calming me down.
I can’t do much from here. But I wish for superpowers that would allow me to go to the capital building and make sure everyone was safe. I wish for a shield to protect them from this madness.
And many other people, from many other things.
I often say that I have a void where my parental instinct might have been. Maybe this is what is feels like. This protectiveness.
I wish for the power to keep everyone safe and doing okay, and I can’t have that. There’s no way that anyone could carry that alone.
What I do have is a solid shade of Blue in the house, the Senate, and the White House. I think of the many good things which could come of that, and I feel heartened. It isn’t – it isn’t everything. But it’s something, and I’ll take it.
I think that there exists a team now that could build that kind of shield. That could get along and do good work. It’s still going to immensely tricky to do, but there’s a framework in place.
I have to believe this will happen.
If it doesn’t, we will find a way to get through.
I know this is – kind of a well worn sentiment or collection of words. And it’s been varying degrees of hard for me to remember that they’re not empty, that there’s something to them.
But please, if you’re having a hard time with the intensity of the world, today, know that you’re not alone. I see you. Remember that there’s a place for you here, remember that you bring something into the world that nothing else can, and that so many of those things are beautiful. Remember that there is hope for all of the things that are wrong, and that healing will come, even when everything seems impossibly dark. Even when all things seem lost.
Feel these words and know that there’s truth in them.
What’s going on in the capital today is terrifying and so far away from being okay. This terrified feeling should never have been our burden to carry. But please don’t stay silent over how wrong this is. Speak up. Be loud. Reach out to one another. Talk this out if you need to.
I hope nobody gets hurt. Nobody. But there have been reports of shots fired. And we don’t know if they are true.
I hope the lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are doing okay. It sounds like they’re safe in this moment.
I know that if the people who stormed this building did not have the privilege that they have, people would be dead.
I’m horrified by the actions of the President of the United States. I’m horrified by his betrayal of the democratic process.
I feel deep concern for the people who were lead so profoundly astray.
This election was not stolen. Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. He will be sworn in. This must be.
Fox is calling this a victory. It isn’t. Fuck that absolute motherfucking bullshit.
I’m afraid for the county that I live in. The fear is so much bigger than this moment.
I’m listening to the news now. I’m going to listen more carefully for a while. I will come back and update more later.
I’ve known I was going to write this post for a long time. I just didn’t know it would be like this.
I remember thinking that since everyone reading this has lived through this last year, I shouldn’t simply write a recap. Like, you were there, you know what happened. I just didn’t know how impossibly sad and tough and scary and intense this time was going to be.
I was going to write about how only person who experienced 2020 the way I did was me, and so I wanted to keep it personal. I want to focus on the ways living through this time has affected me, changed me, made me think.
But fuck, I didn’t see this one coming.
I wanted to write an intricate, beautiful piece about the highs and lows, the personal growth, the shock of how connected I felt to the world in a time of isolation.
I wanted to paint a picture of the frightened, panicked feeling, watching schools shift online, bread sell out completely at the grocery store.
I wanted to write something that captured the depths of the loneliness and depression and the helplessness, and the difficultly of building myself a mental health safety net in the middle of a pandemic.
I wanted to talk about the witches and the watchmen, and about the gunslingers, the characters in the books that kept me alive.
I wanted to talk about finding Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah and I wanted to write about quoting John Mullaney at my friends.
I wanted to write about my sister graduating from high school and about how there weren’t any concerts or musicals and there wasn’t really a ceremony but there was a tiny gathering of friends, in spite of everything, because that’s what she wanted, and I wanted to write about what it felt like to drop her off at school and how I cried all the way home. And then she was gone and the house was empty, but she a few months later she home.
I wanted to talk about how I wished I had lost my job more gracefully, and I wish I hadn’t sworn so much, because it didn’t do any good.
I wanted to write about becoming angry at the government, and at the same time becoming more patriotic than I’ve ever felt in my life, because of the millions of lives that were put in danger by corruption and prejudice and disfunction and incompetence and disregard for the value of a human life. Because I found that I cared about all of those lives and their housing and their water and their educations and their work and their business and their loved ones and their freedom to love their loved ones and their earth.
I wanted to talk about watching John Mullaney & the Sock Lunch Bunch and switching my major to philosophy on a whim.
I wanted to talk about what it felt like when some asshole spray-painted “GOD BLESS AMERICA” over the poetrait of Breonna Taylor, on the painting rock at Geneseo. And what it felt like when somebody re-painted black lives matter back over the top.
I wanted to talk about looking my race-based prejudice dead in the face and saying “I see you. I see that you are there. And there are things I can do to soften the damage that you might cause in this world, and my heart is big and strong and giving enough to help me to do those things.”
I wanted to write about the swimming pool, about building a campfire circle, about trespassing in the woods, about thinking I could be a homesteader with chickens and then deciding I didn’t want to be. I wanted to talk about listening to true crime or climate activism podcasts and slowly becoming an activist when the election drew closer and I wanted to talk about reloading that goddamned map for a week.
I wanted to write about watching Twin Peaks and the Queen’s Gambit, and making soap and cooking Ramen, and the place in the loft of the barn that is mine.
I wanted to talk about 2020.
But I’m having a hard time, writing this.
I’ve been crying all day. Driving back and forth to pick up my sister, drop off my books, listening to Different Radio and NPR and WXXI. I feel flattened. And I’m so tired. I’m crying right now and my belly hurts. I want to sleep for years.
I know there will be no “girls” night at Ari’s house and nobody will kiss when the ball drops and we won’t play games like we did when we called in this year and left the last one behind. So I wanted to send this year off somehow.
I wanted to write a piece that swooped and soured and carried you to high places and brought you down with a gentle thump but I don’t know if I can. I just have this. It’ll have to work. Like a half-baked charm.
A long time ago There was a pregnancy Out of wedlock That drove a young girl In her time and place To run away from home To have her baby in a barn Because there was no space For her In the comfortable places Where people were accepted. Because she was a refugee.
A long time ago Her partner stayed with her Throughout everything Even though She wasn’t carrying his baby.
A long time ago That child, When he grew up Became a radical Who disagreed With the politics of the time Who stood up For the least of these For the oppressed folks In a time when to do this Was a revolution in itself
The child When he grew up Was kind to people No matter who they were Or where they came from Or however they struggled That child When he grew up Has a sex worker for his partner And that child When he grew up Argued against Unkindness, violence And instead He comforted people And said that in the end The universe Was going to catch them. That things would turn out alright No matter what Because everyone was loved If not by one another Then by himself.
He was technically born In the heat of the summer And what we celebrate In the dead of winter In the cold Has older roots So old they’re almost forgotten
This time Honors the darkest days of the year With light and feasting Carries us through Keeps hope alive Worships the sun With blood and bone
In ways we remember In our own traditions Not pale reflections Only different, Changed, evolved.
The lights on the fir tree And the smell of pine The oven that warms the kitchen From early until late Preparing celebratory food And the connections between people Who’ve come home.
Perhaps in the cold We stayed together As a bigger group To stay warm, and alive During the coldest time When predators roamed
And now the predator Is too small to see Has invisible teeth And it goes for the lungs And it takes us down slowly… And it goes for the elderly and the weak.
So this time We must, for the most part Not band together Against the cold and the dark And something very old and sacred Is honored clumsily Through electric blue screens Over the tops of masks
But when we wear masks That cover out faces We are forced If we look at each other To look into one another’s eyes For maybe the first time In a very long time. And it’s harder Not to recognize the humanity In everyone It’s harder not to be kind When you have to look Into somebody’s eyes.
And kindness
Like the refugee’s baby reminded us Like the prostitute’s partner reminded us
Last final exam essays are good enough, and submitted. I don’t have to think about German or Philosophy for a month, so hooray…
I really am feeling so incredibly pleased with myself.
Right now I’m laying in bed, drinking mango jalapeño beer from my brother in law’s brewery, listening to an episode of Amanda Palmer’s podcast. Comfortable feeling.
I have this stash of chocolate in my sock drawer, plus a few packs of Ramen noodles. In the fridge downstairs I have a giant jar of pickles, a smallish bag of pretzel rolls, like three blueberry muffins, and some bologna. Between that and what my mom keeps on hand, which is basically everything, I am so fucking set.
Also have a few books to get through over the break. A couple of Discworld books I’ve been saving, that sixth Dark Tower book. Also some Baldwin and mayyyybe the Obamas. It’s a tall stack.
Tomorrow morning I’m going to drop my sister off at work, come home, pack a couple of sandwiches and a book, bundle up and go outside to the barn. Making a test batch of soap with some random oils I have kicking around, to see if that’s something that works, up there in the cold. I hope it does.
Of all of the things I could have decided to hyperfixate on, I have no idea why it chose soapmaking. But hey, I mean, I’ve learned enough things about this process at this point that when my dad says “careful working with lye” I can tell him exactly what to do if it spills without thinking twice. I know about soaponification values and the right oils for swirls and the difference between hot process and cold process curing times and how to calculate a lye discount and I don’t know why any of this is useful, to me, in my life, but the information is in my brain and the impulse to try is fluttering away at my consciousness on a nearly constant basis.
I just – I feel like this is happening to me for the same reason that so many engineers switch careers to go into culinary school. The math is fun, the applicable math is also fun, but applying math in the world frequently takes time. There’s a lot instant gratification in the process of making things that are tangible and close by and almost ready and sweetie could you put the kettle on…
It’s a bit like making art.
The days start getting longer tomorrow and I love you. 💜
Hammock chairs hanging from the rafters. They are over six feet apart in a well-ventalated space. Folding chairs folded into the corner of the space. It’s cold up there, and it’s still a bit dusty, but it’s much better than it was before. The roof makes other-worldly sounds when the wind blows across it, and you have to watch out for the uneven and weak places in the floor, but probably nobody’s about to crash through it.
Okay so the other evening I wrote about an adventure in which I ducked in and out of a grocery store for a bottle of peach juice and I don’t think I ever actually explained why.
I needed it for brewing stuff, for the batch of peach wine that I back sweetened and bottled this evening.
It’s been bulk aging since August or early September, I think. So our secondary fermentation is complete and all the little yeast babies have died.
Their spirits are still with us.
Once the yeast dies there isn’t too much of a chance that the pressure inside the bottle will cause an explosion. Probably. When you’ve racked off the wine into a clean container enough times, and no more dust is falling out of solution, it’s time.
The ironic thing about all of this is that I can’t actually drink more than a very small amount of alcohol, at the moment. It’s this medication that I’m taking. But, fuck, is that a worthwhile tradeoff.
It helps that I just really enjoy the process of brewing. That’s where most of the joy is, anyway.
So this evening I asked my parents to help me out, taste testing this batch, as I added sweet peach juice until it was palatable. Because, fuck, this one fermented all the way dry. She needed a little help.
Mom and dad made ehhhh noises as I added sugar a little at a time, mixed it in, gave them a taste in a small drinking glass, until it had turned out okay. At the point when their tongues tingled in the back, as the wine splashed down, it was good enough.
I made one bottle that was much sweeter than the rest, as a treat.
And as I was doing that, Evie was also moving around the kitchen making snickerdoodles, and we were all listening to John Denver & The Muppets Christmas album, and Mom and Dad were on the computer looking at hats to buy one another as a gift exchange. Mom is getting tipsy, Dad is tired enough to be cracking jokes.
I felt happy.
And the thing about Christmas is that I used to feel like there was a certain way that I ought to be feeling. A particular spirit, a vibe. It’s like something I almost remember but can’t put my finger on. It was magic. It had to do with short days and the smell of pine, with oranges and cookies. It was lights on a tree or snow on the ground. It was a certain collection of music. Old movies. Tradition, the festival we come back to. Gift giving. More than the sum of the parts.
I don’t find that feeling in those things. Not anymore, or at least not right now. Not more than a very little bit. Maybe it is something that gets lost over time.
So instead of missing it, or longing for it, I’m letting it go. There’s a good time to be had right here, without pining for something I don’t have, can’t hold.
It doesn’t even have to be a good time, all the time. It just is.
Sometimes it’s just – moments like this one.
Evie puts together a fucking kick ass outfit with hoop earrings and a French tuck. I sloppily apply eye liner because I keep meaning to learn how to do that thing. I find out that I got a 95 on my third of three logic exams, which puts me at a 96.7 for the class. I will take it. The kid I was virtual-tutoring got a 90 and passed with an 85. I feel proud. The cats fight in the hall upstairs, and the dog curls up at our feet under the table.
It’s December 18th, 2020, and things are going to be alright. And I love you so much. And I don’t usually say always, but I that’s what I generally mean in the words I don’t say.
We’ve got power in the workshop. Yes it’s run all the way from the house. No you can’t ask how many extension chords, I don’t want to talk about that number.
We can theoretically plug in a crock pot or a blender or some shit at this point. A friend tells me that extension chords might not be able to handle too many things asking for energy at once. (This is very fucking relatable.) Not sure if we can get a space heater to work, up here, with things set up the way that they are right now. If I had a space heater, I would absolutely try it. For kicks.
It isn’t actually too cold up there, though. It’s out of the wind. Bundle up with a couple of layers and some rain boots and folks should be okay.
At least one hammock chair tomorrow.
Iiii’m feeling fucking androgynous today.
This is the compromise, the place where I can present or think of myself as gendered without having to try so hard that it feels like a mask.
Funny story – a friend who lives in Virginia reportedly said, out loud, in middle school, that they didn’t think trans people really existed because if trans people did exist then they would probably be one.
And like. Lo and behold…
They like to light things on fire and walk in the woods at night listening to frogs.
Alternatively, going out for an emergency Mochi run at Trader Joe’s and then driving home slowly with the windows down blasing Kanye is totally fine.
Their favorite shirt from Target has rainbow pinstripes and says “be the gay dad you want to be in the world.”
Thriving.
God, I wish I was that cool. We send each other memes.
Anyway. As soon as I get through this third out of three logic exams tomorrow, I can spend more time away from the books. The weather is supposed to get a bit warmer, too.
The plan is to go out there with a crock pot and the backpack full of lye and oil and wax that I’ve been compulsively hording all semester, and make beautiful interesting smelly chemical things happen in a space where it doesn’t matter if I create too much of a mess.
And I can do this
because I have my own space to work
and because we’ve got power.
Anyway I should be studying. I hope it’s an excellent evening and I love you.
Here i am, huddled in the leeward side of a Dunkin Donuts in the snow. My glasses are fogging up from the cold and the surgical mask, and there is a random a bottle of peach juice crandled carefully in one arm. If I recall correctly I was feeling grateful because I hadn’t gotten hit by a car a few minutes before. It wasn’t close, I just felt the relief.
Wanted to write this moment down.
I was only standing there in the first place because my mother was spending an eternity in a farming supply store and I had things that needed doing. I’d walked the length of road between the outskirts of the village and the grocery store, made a beeline across the parking lot, and ducked inside.
The signage over the automatic doors read “cover your face, keep everyone safe.”
About five minutes later I was out of the store with a bottle of peach juice in one pocket of this green vest I found in the back of the closet. It’s funny, I spend so much time in there, I should’ve noticed it sooner.
My mother was still in the other store, and the snow was really starting to fall. So I kept walking, down the familiar length of sidewalk towards the center of the village. To the right was a polished instantiation of an American coffee shop chain. I stood there for a second, trying to decide if it was worth it to wait inside because of the possibility of coronavirus or if I should stay outside in the cold. In that pandemic moment, my face was turning a painful shade of pink.
I risked the virus and ordered an egg & vegetable/sausage/cheddar cheese sandwich on a toasted everything bagle for $4.50. The best choice.
Now there is a sandwich in a paper bag in one pocket, a glass jug of peach juice in the other. Plus wallet and phone and miscellaneous.
Ten minutes later, I had managed to walk most of the way back to the edge of the village. Past the Goodwill and the Brewery that closed down. Past the harware store and the pizza shop and the liquor store and the chiropractor’s office. Past the graveyard with the pine trees where Jenna’s older sister isn’t, really.
I feel like I own this road, for a second. It doesn’t belong to me, but jt’s mine.
By the time my mother was done in the store, I was about level with the graveyard. Mom put the cat litter and the dog food and the suspiciously high number of tarps in the back of the Jeep. I tumbled into the driver’s seat and nibbled on the edge of a sandwich, for a minute, and let beads of condensation form on the lenses of my glasses.
We drove home.
Whe we got here, I basically just submitted my Eastern Philosophy final and collapsed. It has been a very long string of pandemic moments, and I am so tired.
I’m putting together a work space, in the attic of the barn, in the back yard.
it’s cold up there, but it isn’t anywhere near as bad as being outside in the snow. plus once I’ve figured out a space heater it’ll be fucking toasty.
Electricity is going to involve far too many extension chords, but hey. This is fine.
The pinnacle accomplishment for this space would be hanging the hammock chairs from the rafters. Or just a regular hammock.
Possibly a plastic tote with Oreos and other nonsense? At the very least a plethora of snacks.
On top of all of these things, my family talked about it and everybody thinks that it might be okay to hang out with friends up there, in a carefully socially distanced manner. I would be so down for that.
But I also like the idea of bundling up and going up there alone. I’m way too excited to hang out up there over the break and make soap or some shit and blast Hozier and LP over my terrible phone speakers and dance around with a broomstick like an actual ten year old child.
Hey so this dandelion wine is turning out nicely. This is the second bottle of five – opened the first one when the news networks called it, and it wasn’t quite ready then. This batch is better when served room temperature, which is apparently odd for a white wine. I’m picking up on some floral notes, with a surprisingly high alcohol content for the amount of sweetness present. Tastes like what freshly cut lawn in the summer smells like, almost, if you could bottle that smell.
I’ve been walking down this road for roughly 21 years, if you count all the times in the strollers, and this is the first time I’ve taken a picture that actually captured what it feels like to be there at night in the winter. This picture reminds me of that long road at Auschwitz. That thought gives me chills. Maybe it’s the perspective.
Twenty two years of my dad and my mom and me and sometimes even my sisters have walked this road. That’s a lot of leftover footprints. That’s a lot of our soul stuff, in that dust.
Just leaving some photos here for the evening and can’t really sit here and write for too long. I just wanted to post these because I really like them.
Finally got to sleep at two in the morning, aaand now we are awake again. At 4:30 AM, practicing logic and thinking up soap recipes at the kitchen table. Trying really, really hard to avoid the dark and apparently bottomless anxiety whirlpools which are right fucking there at the edge of my brain, persistently requesting an audience.
I am running out of ingredient combinations and the free variables are getting mixed up. Soon I might have to get super worked up about British colonialism and then go write a paper about it.
I feel far too awake. More awake than I’ve felt in a long time. Also incredibly tired.
I also successfully crocheted a hat. First ever time.
So close to the end of a semester. I’m finding it genuinely strange that I don’t feel compeltely exhausted. I have to finish up an essay about The Tempest, take a test on Mosim and Confucianism and Taoism, and study for an exam about symbolic logic.
The Tempest is surprisingly not terrible. For one of my last essays this semester, I get to write about whether or not Shakespeare actually intended to write commentary on the impacts of colonialism on indigenous people when he wrote this play. I think that it’s easy to read things that way, with the benefit of hindsight. But maybe the benefit of hindsight was something that Shakespeare didn’t have? And we can’t really know, for sure.
I think that a lot of the meanings of things are actually up to the readers of things. The writers are mostly just trying to find the right words.
🍃
I really like Taoism.
My professor pointed out that there are actually a lot of things that Taoism doesn’t have the answers for. Taoism knows this, and to this, Taoism just kind of says “fuck it, there are some things in life that we can’t have the answers for all of the time.”
(Tutoring 101, bitches.)
Also, I adore the implication that all of these other philosophies are trying way fucking too hard. As a philosophy student, I think this is an excellent point. Plato really should’ve tried this whole go with the flow, don’t try to force things approch to life. It might have helped him out with that neurotic perfectionism 🙃🤭
Honestly, I just feel like philosophers are meant to take issue with everything, all the time. Consequently, they’re really bad at practicing Taoism.
🍂
Studying logic makes me miss mathematics.
It’s an upside down and backwards feeling, but I like using my brain this way. Might treat myself to applied statistics in the spring, because then Geneseo will let me have a math minor and that is something I want in this life. May live to regret those words.
In my first life, I was a farmer. My earliest memory was of my mother Her voice, her cool hands, her laugh When I was a boy, I would play in the dirt by the river Under the sky.
‘till I was a man, my mother would teach me My purpose, my path, my duty My lot in this life. Dharma. Beside her I would work with the earth, by the river Under the sky.
When I was a young man As my mother lay dying She taught me about souls About rebirth, and uncountable lives And the ultimate promise of bliss.
And I asked her, “Will you remember your last life, mama? When you wake up Will you remember me…”
In my next life, I was a merchant’s daughter. My earliest memory was about my nurse, because My family was very rich, and always very busy Attending to duty Attending to matters of soul.
When I was a young girl, My nurse taught me the story of many lives About how, if I was very bad Then in my next life I would surely be reborn As one of those people, The least of these, the suffering, The dirty, the unloved.
When I was a young person I learned that the continued suffering of these people For entire lifetimes Was justified, because of the things Their souls had done, in a previous life When I was a young person I learned that some people Deserved to be treated better than others Because of things they couldn’t remember Things that had been done By a different body, a different personality A different self.
And so, when I was a woman I did my duty. I became a wife And when I carried children into the world Into a family of a rank superior to that of the commoners and servants I knew that the souls of my children, in previous lives Must somehow have earned this place in the world
And when I grew old and passed away I came back to life in a body In a family In a caste In a place in the universe That I had earned. The universe keeps score. Karma.
And so, I lived, and died, and was reborn so many times Lives like single beads, added to necklace, one by one And in each life, I had a self A shape. A body Personhood Character Me.
There were boundaries, shaped differently each time Between what was myself and what was other But that didn’t stop me from reaching out Connecting to the things outside, because I had mothers and fathers Friends that I loved and lost Gods that I worshiped Lovers to hold
And in each finite, temporary life I worried over things that didn’t matter And my heart ached for the things That I wanted but could never have Hopes that I reached out for all my life And never touched And it hurt. So much. But sometimes it was beautiful
And I wondered If I was given the choice To have unending, perfect happiness and bliss At the cost of losing This illusion of having An individual self, At the very end of everything… I wondered if I would make that choice. I wondered if it would be worth it If that happiness Would be an empty kind.
Still, I was told Over and over again That none of these things in my lives should matter That their temporary nature Only ever causes pain And in the end, it’s better to let things go Better not to get attached, not to feel desire at all
Because the soul that is free from desire and loathing The soul that is free from earthly attachments Can ascend the cycle of reincarnation Can escape from suffering and pain And become one with God, with Brahmin With the spirit of the universe
It all starts to blur together, Once it’s been a little while.
But in one life, I was a warrior And in my clearest memory, I was standing on a battlefield Where kin were fighting against kin In ugly conflict And I – I was unable To fulfil my duty, live up to my purpose. My concern over causing bloodshed My connection to my family Was too strong.
I was wounded in the battle Crumpled, dying By the river, in the dirt Beneath the sky.
In those last moments Before that old familiar feeling My chariot driver caught my eye And gave me a long, long look In that moment, I felt like I understood But the next time I opened my eyes All of my understanding was gone.
Because in my next life, When I opened my eyes I couldn’t see When I screamed and screamed I couldn’t hear my own screaming I was filled with pain From the tips of my toes To the edges of everything And I never knew who I was because I didn’t live For more than a couple of hours And I couldn’t remember why.
And in my next life, I was starving Bent double with hunger most of the time I had to steal in order to live And nobody told me the story of many lives I never knew
In the life after that, I was a woman A servant, in a wealthy house And the men in the house Would take me outside And in the dirt, beside the river I did my duty And never said a word Until one day I snapped And defended myself And caused them harm
And in the life after that, I was punished. Because of the life I was born into, I killed many men to survive.
And the life after that, And the life after that, And the life after that And the universe keeps score And when does it stop…
Eventually, by chance, many lives down the road This soul stopped falling Something or somebody caught me I started to earn my way back Towards a chance at something better
In the space of uncountable lifetimes, Maybe that’s what justice is Maybe that’s the balance Over time.
I don’t know.
I know that in this life, I like to play with words I am not aware of my previous selves But they were the path that brought me here To this personalily, with this shape This consciousness, equipped to feel All the pleasure and pain This illusion of a self That will only exist in the universe For this one single time.
There’s something sacred about the existence of me. Of each of us, together, on this path.
Because of that sacredness I have to wonder If this incarnation deserves To be saddled with the debts That the soul has accumulated Along the way As other people In other lives
Can we really, truly decide That a person’s birth status Into one class of society Where they will be treated Better or worse than somebody else Is permeant, irredeemable In the space of an entire life
How do we know That this life, in this moment (in the dirt, beside the river, under the sky…) Isn’t all we have?
These ideas were borrowed from the Bhagavad Gita, and from a book called The Purpose of Life by Professor Carlo Filice.
Currently procrastinating a free form writing assignment for Eastern philosophy, which is due tomorrow. I have very few parameters – compare the perspectives from one of the modern philosophers we read for this class (my professor’s book, essentially) with another viewpoint from an ancient text (the Gita, the koran, the Analects.) I could write a dialogue or a poem or a short story or a play, if I want to, so long as I’m demonstrating that I know my stuff.
Free-form poetry is probably my medium of choice. The words just – tumble. Because they are allowed.
Anyway. Things I did instead of working on this project, today –
Walked three miles
Had a neat conversation about mental health things
Online thrift shopped for ingredients for homemade things to give people over the holidays. I think I almost have enough time to pull this off.
Asked the folks in the group chat about their favorite smells. Answers included vanilla, gasoline, camp fire smoke, all types of vinegar, race car exaust, grapefruit, jasmine, and bleach. I love all of them.
Listened to my 2020 spotify playlist on fucking repeat because I am a child
Washed my hair and brushed my teeth and changed my shirt and you know what those things should be non-events but I haven’t left the house in a while so I – yeah. Actually felt kind of amazing.
Also I keep forgetting that I’m blond, so
Listened to one of Amanda Palmer’s podcast episodes, in which she interviews memiorist/musician Storm Large. Storm Large is responsible for the song “8 miles wide,” which has been stuck in my head for three days and I think everyone should live through that at some point.
Rescued my sister from her friend’s transphobic republican dad who was moody because his bl*e lives matter flag mysteriously went missing
Ate satisfying quantities of popcorn and sipped cold tea which I brewed for myself and then promptly forgot about for like two hours
Bickered with my mom because she remembers watching me do things that I have no recollection of doing like five minutes later and it is disconcerting to the nth degree
Watched an old movie about Pirates ☠
I don’t know. I felt like few things happened today, but now that I write things down… that’s kind of a lot, and no wonder I feel tired. Should rest; I have some serious free form poetry bullshitting to do until 11:59 tomorrow.
Is it Thursday, already? I hope it was strange and full and satisfying, and I hope you got to the end of this day and felt like it was time for some rest 🖤
My little sister bleached my hair today! On a wooden stool, in the upstairs bathroom with the window open to let the cold in and the fumes out. Still can’t quite get warm.
She’d only ever seen this done in YouTube videos, so of course she did an excellent job. Didn’t burn my scalp. I can still use my eyes. We’re fine.
She was actually surprised that I’d trusted her to try. I just think that when the worst case scenario is ending up with Airbender vibes for a while… it’s really just okay to try things that are new.
So, yeah. I am temporarily blond. I don’t not like it. We’re halfway to color, & I’m kind of enjoying this.
I hope it’s a lovely Wednesday night. 🌙
PS – my sister has her driver’s test tomorrow afternoon and is stressing the fuck out about it. I took her driving earlier. Her parallel parking skills are better than mine but that is not a high bar.
I hope she does well. I hope she has that freedom, soon; she doesn’t like being stuck at home. I feel like – if she does her best – she’s going to do okay.
CW – medication shenanigans, pissedoffedness at the American Healthcare system, feelings.
Today we are embarking on the adventure of trying the meds. My therapist agrees that this is a path that makes sense.
A psychiatrist’s office who happens to take my insurance happened to be taking new patients during a time when I happened to have insurance during a time when I happened to be in a solid enough mental space to make a phone call and schedule and appointment. This is like one of those planetary alignments that only happens once every several thousand years.
Feeling a little scared. The last time I tried to do this, I got a prescription from the kind of GP who immediately goes into crisis mode whenever the words “suicidal ideation” enter the room.
It’s like the conversation ends at the precise moment when the emergency training takes over. The talk is no longer about trying to find a way to make my life more livable, the talk is now about keeping me alive. There’s a difference there.
And I came here today because I needed your help with the first thing, not the second thing. I came here because I can’t do this thing by myself, I have tried, I still really haven’t let go of needing to do this alone because my ego takes up so much space but I’m here, and I really need to focus to stay on the thing that I came here for. I don’t want to talk about whether or not I have a plan, or if I have people in my life who’d be sad if I wasn’t here anymore. Not with you. Not with a stranger with a clipboard in this sterile, impersonal room with florescent lights.Please.
Not in this moment when it’s impossibly hard to remember what I came here to ask for and why in the first place because my thoughts are scattered from the drive and the traffic and the co-pays and the children in the waiting room. Not in this moment when I’m not sure if I’ll be treated for the right thing becsuse the words that convey what I’m trying to tell you won’t necessarily come out of my mouth when they’re called.
Last time I tried taking meds, and didn’t feel comfortable being open with the doctor doing the prescribing, I was… I ended up being too tired to move for several months and I never realized why. Ultimately, I ended up taking myself off 30mg’s of antidepressants, not quite cold turkey but almost, without telling anyone, just when they’d actually started working, because…
sometimes, I am miraculously dumb.
We’re trying this again, now, because I’m in a place where things are livable but I don’t know when the other shoe is going to drop. I have to try to put a safety net in place while the sun’s still out, before it’s too dark to see. But I don’t know if this net is actually going to catch me.
And I – you know. My mother told me once that she worries that if I take meds that mess with how my brain works, I will literally become a different person without realizing this from the inside. Because she doesn’t trust western medicine, she finds evidence in fringe places on the internet to support that the possibility that the side effects isn’t worth the risk of trying to find something that helps. When I tell my family that I’m going to try taking meds again, her jaw clenches and the lines around her eyes get harsher.
If only I would take fish oil, and go for more walks in the sun…
It’s hard for me. I can’t tell if this feeling about not wanting to have to take pills is my pride or my intuition or my mother’s bias.
Anyway.
I went and met with psychiatric nurse practitioner – over the phone, because COVID, but her voice seemed alright. It went okay. Those meetings are strange, because of how personal they become, so quickly.
Apparently I have to try one kind of medicine first, even though it might not be perfect for me, because insurance companies will only pay for the better stuff if I can’t tolerate the older stuff which happens to be cheaper. On the plus side, it sounds like this person will listen to me if I tell her I’m not tolerating it well.
I really just kind of hate the entire American health care system.
Also, note to self – don’t fall down the internet rabbithole of reading reviews about people who experienced horrible terrible side effects from the same exact dose of a new medication that I’ve been prescribed. Don’t do that, ever again. That is the stuff of nightmares.
Breathe.
I’m glad I got around to doing this.
There were a lot of things on my list, in the world of health, at the beginning of 2020. Find a therapist, replace the glasses I lost in Germany, take care of the wisdom teeth, start the process of finding meds that actually feel okay. I’ve done those things, even in the midst of the chaos that this year has been. And it feels good, even though I am exhausted, even though there will always be other things. I feel oddly lucky.
For now, I am just – sitting on the couch. It’s grey out. There are cats. I don’t have that pervasive feeling that I’m not really, actually loved, because I’m too busy thinking about how to build a sentence out of German words. My legs hurt, but I’d like to walk soon anyway.
This afternoon I got out of the house, went for a walk, and listened to a LPOTL compilation episode called “Best of Cannibalism.” You know, like just in time for Thanksgiving. It was fucking cold outside. Easier to breathe.
I ordered a copy of the Queen’s Gambit novel and knew that I wasn’t going to get around to reading it for a while, so I gave it to my dad and he and my mom were taking turns reading it to each other out loud.
Hairdye is in transit, somewhere in the Midwest.
Second order predicate logic is kind of a trip.
We are putting off German until the very last minute, however
Anyway.
Ancient Philosophy essay is – ehhh. I am slightly frightened to announce that I have not made any progress on this word count. Instead, I went back and revisited some of the things I didn’t fully understand about the prompt, and discovered that there was actually a lot more information to sift through and process. To be fair, these 2000+ yo texts make for some really dense reading material. but I think there were some key points that I hadn’t quite built brain pathways around, yet. And internalizing them really did help.
I think maybe as I’ve been writing this – I’ve been trying to put the puzzle pieces together without knowing how all of the edges were shaped. But as I, like – break these wide swaths of information down into smaller pieces, and sit with them, and look at them from different angles, and parse out pieces of meaning – it gets easier to understand how everything fits.
Inconsistent metaphoring my way through life this evening, apparently. So sorry.
It’s just that when everything fits together by itself, I’m not sitting here spending time trying to force it. Trying to bullshit your way through explaining how something makes logical sense when it doesn’t, not yet, not without a couple of key pieces of information, is genuinely stressful. It’s also a lot of work.
There are only so many ways to rearrange the pictures on the walls. Chew your food. I don’t know. 83’s are nothing to be ashamed of.
Tomorrow I’m going to sit down and write in the way that I used to write in those in-person timed exams, where they took away your phone and locked you in a room for three hours with six pieces of loose leaf paper and a blue or black ink pen. I’m going to write without worrying about spelling the the words incorrectly. I’m going to write without copy/pasting large chunks of paragraph from one end of a paper to another and backspacing up and down a line until I’ve got it sounding right.
And I’m going to do a brave thing and leave my notes in another room. Because I studied those all day today, and I have a much better idea of what I’m talking about, now.
We’re just going to put down some words.
I hope it’s a really good night.
PS
this cat – unprompted- decided to climb up on my shoulders earlier today. She then proceeded to not move when I stood up and walked into the kitchen to refill the coffee mug. This made my entire week. She used to sit on my shoulders all the time, but she was smaller then. I’m telling you this now so that you’ll know that it really happened.
The intention for this assignment is to demonstrate that I understand a couple of different ideas which I’m not sure if I actually do understand. I get flashes of comprehension, sometimes. Sometimes I can even put them into words.
What if I didn’t understand, correctly? What if I don’t understand this well enough?
And, always, the familiar internal rabbithole that my brain loves to tumble down – why is understanding so fucking difficult? What if there’s something wrong with me?
I’m trying to practice not engaging with those. I don’t know if they’re real or not, but they don’t help. At best, spending energy fighting them is almost as draining as spending energy feeling them. Better to leave them alone.
Once I’ve sort of gotten the ideas written out, there is the difficulty of making sure that all the pieces fit together in a way that makes sense. And sometimes the pieces just – don’t want to go together. Either because of choices I’ve already made, or things I don’t quite understand, or because two of the pieces conflict and I can’t let their edges touch. It’s like working on a jigsaw puzzle, but I made the pieces, I can change their shapes.
Five pages.
Fuck.
I have a folding table set up next to a couch in the living room windows. I have coffee and a cup of water and my tablet. I have all my notes printed off. I’m going to switch gears and try to work through this thing for a bit.
Ordered hair dying things online, directly from <<<not Amazon>>> so that I wouldn’t have to financially support a trillionaire or go the store. I made a life decision and picked out a color. Also ordered a bottle for the younger sister of a friend, so that we could both afford free shipping.
Played through to the end of TWEWY, which I’d meant to do for ages. Just found out that we’re getting a sequel. The storytelling in this game is – rather traumatic, and also beautifully done. Art is fucking neat. I quite liked it.
Watched ASMR videos of people carving up blocks of soap with razer blades. Proceeded to go looking for my own knife and a bar of soap. This is ridiculously satisfying and I genuinely don’t know why.
Consumed two cookies, macaroni and cheese, and sweet potato fries.
Scrolled through m e m e s
Did the bare minimum approch to laundry where not much folding or putting away actually happens
I also did some push-ups, which is… if I’ve gotten to the point where I’m preferentially doing calisthenics instead of homework, things are getting pretty bad.
I hope it isn’t a horrible – idk what fucking day this is, I’m sorry. Lots of love.
Fucking random life update – my hair is hopefully going to change color, sometime this month!
You can tell that I’m serious about this because today I asked for thoughts and opinions in the New Year’s Eve group chat, and then totally ignored all of the supportive input and excellent suggestions from everyone and made up my own mind about things.
Not sure what color we’re going with, yet, but ideas are floating around. Something that pops. I’m wholeheartedly drawing inspiration from an anime I watched like a year ago with a friend.
Also, there’s this girl in my German class whose hair has changed color about three times this semester and one of the styles she went with was really beautiful and I miiiight steal it, or at least come up with a similar idea and run with it.
<<<watch as we end up in the same class next semester and I just wear hats the entire time because I don’t want her to think I copied her without asking/stole her intellectual property/attempted identity fraud>>>
I’m not sure what I’m doing… I haven’t really done this on my own before. The last time, like a hundred years ago, my older sister helped me, and she knew what she was doing.
Woke up this morning absolutely paralyzed with anxiety because I only have ten days to write a five page paper comparing Aristotle’s perspective on the soul in the second book of De Anima with Plato’s account of Socrates’ perspective on the soul in the Phaedo and that is honestly not a thing that I ever thought I would give this many shits about.
I really do not like this feeling.
The sensation of absolute dread in my stomach, the experience of physically not being able to move because of the possibility that I will create a trashy paper (translation – not get an A) and then my entire GPA will shrivel up and die and I will have to run away to the deep woods with a bag of rice and stay there forever because of how utterly unhirable and worthless I am to the entirety of <<< capitalism >>>
and this paralyzed feeling makes it impossible to even remember the prompt for this paper particularly clearly, let alone think about how I’m going to answer the question, let alone focus on reading and re-reading roughly 100 pages of content necessarily to feel like I understand this material for certain, to feel sure I haven’t misunderstood
let alone begin to use my brain to think, to criticize, to find things that don’t make sense, to analyze and synthesize and connect and compare and brain thoughts and words together into something that makes coherent sense
and the knowledge that I’m not making progress on my assignments makes it worse.
I am capable of staying here
[Stuck, worrying, unable to move or do anything other than this thing that I think that I ought to be doing, unable to walk or sing or be with friends or partners, unable to read or watch TV, or do anything other than scroll through a bottomless pit of memes (tiny sparks of dopamine)]
all day. And then the next day, and the next. Until the very last panicked hours, at which point I’m shoved out into the clearing by the sheer pressure of passing time.
And this really sucks. There are absolutely moments when I’m not sure if I want to do this anymore.
The worst part is that I usually do alright. Objectively. On the surface of things, those grades look okay. Not 100’s on everything but I will fucking take it.
And that makes all of the feelings I feel seem – unsound. Ridiculous. Laughable, almost.
And I do feel satisfied and happy in the moments when I realize that I create something that somebody else thought was well made.
But the cost of that satisfied feeling? It’s so much. Almost too much.
I am not sure what to do, but I hope you’re doing okay this evening. 🖤
Okay so this fucking duolingo bird has been sending me passive aggressive messages for a long ass time. I’m well aware that I’m making Duo sad, at this point. No, I can’t take ten minutes to practice, actually. Sorry.
I have fucking pavloved myself into feeling profound guilt whenever I see that particular shade of green and I don’t like it. 😅😂
I feel like I got frustrated with the German sequence when we started talking about the dative case. At that point, we were up to roughly twelve entirely context dependant variations on the word “the.” There are more of them.
Even as a native English speaker with no concept of any of the grammer things, I feel like I could totally have picked up on the idea of indirect objects, if you’d given me a lot of time in a room alone.
What really got me was the completely arbitrary gendering of nouns. Why the fuck are statues feminine while ducks are masculine while beer is neuter while there is no singular word for grandparent? I can’t.
German 101 is about to be over and done with. There’s an exam on Thursday.
We’ve been spending time with modal verbs. There are also these other verbs with separating prefixes – these fuckers sometimes just split in half and conjugate as they migrate to opposite ends of the sentence, for some reason. Other times, they don’t.
Also, there are pronouns and prepositions for the accusative and dative cases. I don’t mind those, even though I’m still thinking about them as neatly and conveniently lined up in a chart. I wish I could just – call them to mind whenever I needed them, pluck them of the air, instead of thinking of columns and rows.
It would also be nice if I didn’t have to jump back and forth between German words and English words in order to understand their meaning. Why can’t the German words contain meaning in their own right, without having to refer back to English? I can’t decide if this has more to do with where I am in the process of learning, or if I’m doing this wrong.
Anyway. It’s important that I keep working through this, until I can hold my own in a conversation, because Kathrin is going to have a baby and I need to be able to communicate with this tiny human in words. Eventually.
When this child is three and I’m approximately twenty four, I’d like for our skill in the language to be roughly comparable, for entirely ego related reasons.
The first time these two fly across the pond to visit the states, I want to be able to talk about how the journey was in a language that’s familiar. Just because. If Kathrin needed me to fly across the pond and live in Münster for a time, if she needed that help, then I’d do it.
But it would be nice if I could understand the conversations going on around me.
I have no real obligation to Kathrin’s baby whatsoever, objectively, perhaps. But if this is the motivation that I need in order to pass this final with flying colors – then there we are.
Went for a drive today. Listened to world café on WXXI. They were interviewing one of the songwriters who worked on the musical Jagged Little Pill. I thought it was a neat interview. Later, they played Jewel’s who will save your soul and Tracy Chapmin’s new beginning. It isn’t often that there are four good songs on the radio, consecutively, without changing the station. Singing along without having to worry about who could hear me was a really nice time.
Once, not too long ago, I would drive fast with the windows down and blast pop music and sip black coffee out of an open mug. Even when the air was freezing cold, like it was today. Mostly just to keep from feeling anything.
I aaam not feeling looped in with that part of myself at the moment.
It was really fucking cold out, like I said. It takes forever for the heat to start working in the Jeep. My hands just about froze to the steering wheel and typing is still difficult. Also, the tank was almost empty and I was not entirely sure that my debit card had enough funds to get me out of that situation. I made it there and back fine.
On the radio on the way home, they were interviewing an expert on the ethics of vaccine distribution. Health care workers and adults with preexisting health conditions are two groups given some of the highest priority, I think. My dad is in both of those groups.
Since I’m relatively young, not working in an essential service, and I don’t have a preexisting health condition, I’ll probably be one of the last to receive a vaccine. I’m not sure what the approach is for students, yet. The risk of transmission to family members feels like the biggest concern. Right now, I’m trying to set up my schedule for next semester so that I don’t have to go on campus, because – I don’t think the SUNY system is going to fully transition everything online. We’ll see what happens.
A couple of weeks ago, Jenna’s mother and step dad caught and recovered from the virus, but her step dad was hospitalized for dehydration. Currently, a friend from high school is in quarantine since her roommate tested positive. Way back in February, an acquaintance of my dad’s was stuck on a cruise ship off the coast of Japan for like two weeks when the virus broke out onboard.
A few people at SUNY Geneseo have tested positive and are isolating in one of the disused dorm buildings. I think maybe there are like forty cases in the county where I live overall.
In this moment, I’m finding that I’m a bit frightened. I don’t know if fear does much of anything to help.
This is one of the first times that I’ve felt happy that there isn’t really family to be with on Thanksgiving. We’ll watch reruns of the parade at home, cook some food.
CW – police brutality, violence against trans folk.
On Nov 3rd in Canandaigua, a Black trans woman named Chanel Hines was shot three times in the chest by her parole officer. She did not recieve medical atrention for an hour and a half after she was shot.
As of Nov 10th, she was in stable but worsening condition in the hospital, about to have her third emergency surgery. She hasn’t had much contact with her family during this time. Like a five minute cell phone call with her mom.
Friends are raising money for legal support. More detailed and eloquent information about this is in the gofundme link:
Nobody I’ve talked to who lives locally has heard anything about this. I’m having a weird emotional response to the implications of that lack of media coverage that is somewhere between unsurprised and horrified and really fucking sad.
There’s no such thing as “too close to home” anymore. Everywhere in the universe where this shit happens is too close to home. But this time it feels so much more personal.
A friend who lives in Canandaigua said something to the effect of “to everyone who said that something like this couldn’t happen here, put your money where your privileged mouth is and donate.”
What he said.
Aaand if you can’t donate right in this moment, which is totally a valid space to be, please consider sharing on social media or in your circles. It does help.
Like forever ago, I had this massive crush on a childhood friend. I think it must have been one of the first times I ever had a crush on a real actual three dimensional human being, and the entire experience was such a trip. I just thought he was extraordinarily pretty and ridiculously cool, and we honestly had some pretty excellent adventures. We were like ten or eleven at the time.
He was completely clueless about this mess of feelings that I had in his general direction. Which was impressive. I have always thought of myself as really good at hiding how I feel about things, but according to literally everyone else that I know, that is decidedly not true. Which is kind of funny actually.
But yeah, he was totally clueless. He had no idea. He was never going to have any idea. If he’d ever found out, he probably would have thought the whole situation was a bit odd, laughed for a bit, and gone on with his life without giving it a second thought.
That was fine. I would probably have died if I’d thought that he suspected.
Shit was soo much easier back then, man.
I haven’t spoken to this punk in roughly a decade, at this point. Things that feel like they’re going to last forever in life sometimes come unraveled. And even if it hurts for a hot second, maybe in the long run that’s okay.
But we used to hang out on this beautiful wooded property in Western New York. There were trails through the woods. His parents threw parties every summer that lasted for like days at a time. There was a pond with a rusty paddleboat and salamanders and a rope swing. There were pancakes. There were dogs. We played ghost in thr graveyard and capture the flag in the dark. After the adults had started drunk-singing karaoke, we would go inside and play truth or dare. This whole big rambling Italian family would sit around the campfire and talk, and I think we would lay on our backs and look up at the stars.
It was such a good time.
One of the younger Aunts from this big sprawling clan had this partner that she was totally head over heels in love with. His name was Love, which is actually kind of beautiful name, and he was from Africa. These two adored one another completely. He loved his partner’s daughter, and she actually just had his child.
Sad thing happened.
Love just passed away of liver cancer. He was way to young. His partner and his daughter and step daughter have soo much love and support in their lives from so many directions. From his family, from her family, from all of the friends who paddled around the pond and sat around the campfire and told stories. I have a really strong feeling that they’re all going to get one another though it.
But this family of a friend that I haven’t spoken to in roughly ten years is really fucking going through it right now.
Because sometimes the things that feel like they’re going to last forever in this life come unraveled, when you least expect it. And it hurts like hell.
Here’s a link to a gofundme, for her and her family. For their daughter, who is going to grow up not remembering the face of her dad.
They all might really appreciate a free coffee in this moment, I think. I don’t think it needs to be impossibly much in order to count for something.
I, um – Hooh, boy. I just completely lost my shit with a group of college students who were sitting in a public building on campus, not wearing masks. I think maybe they were working on math homework together or something.
This staff member – I didn’t see her, but I heard her voice, she sounded a bit older, maybe just a tad heavy, literally none of this is relevant – told them off. Not unkindly. Not even in a reprimanding tone of voice. Just a casual remark in passing.
And when she was just about probably out of earshot, one of these punks called her a bitch. And then they laughed about it.
And I totally fucking flipped my shit.
It had been a long day.
If you’re reading this you probably know that I don’t talk to people. Not people I don’t know. Not unless I’m getting paid to initiate conversations.
…but I sure as hell initiated that one.
Still shaking, a bit. More than a bit.
I know for certain that they called me a bitch, too, when I walked away. Or something along those lines. Because I heard one of them tell another to shut the hell up. But I really couldn’t give a flying fuck what they think of me.
I’m not proud of myself. But it isn’t because I’m too much like my mom. It isn’t because I’m compulsive about following rules without thinking critically about them. That isn’t the thing.
I’m a goddamn fucking recovering kleptomaniac. I have been burning forbidden candles in my room in secret for longer than my mother would like to know about. I once accidently smuggled half a joint off Marijuana across an international border. I’m exaustingly critical of the binary political system in America and I think we could actually use a little more socialism than we currently have, here. I don’t really believe in God and I think a lot of Christianity is bullshit but I go to church anyway because I like some of the things that the people there have to say. Also, I’m so far back in the closet that it’s literally fucking snowing, but I’m not exactly cishet.
Being an obsessive rule-follower is not my problem. It really just is not.
But I do wish I had communicated more clearly, in that moment. I wish I had flipped my shit more articulately. I wish my words had packed more punch. Because I don’t think what I said made any difference at all. I don’t think they’ll think twice. I don’t think they’re going to change. I have zero control over the actions of other people and i know this, so I’m not sure if it would have made any difference, anyway. I don’t know if it matters.
But fuck do I wish those words had come out making sense.
Please, for the love of everything that matters. Put on a goddamn mask. It is a small peice of fabric over half of your face. It is, at worst, a minor discomfort or inconvenience.
No, I don’t care if you feel fine. It doesn’t mean you’re not asymptomatic.
No, I don’t care that you tested negative. A negative test result is a reflection of the amount of virus in your system at a very specific moment in time. Also, a negative test result isn’t always going to be accurate. The margin of error for these things is really high. It doesn’t mean you don’t have the plague.
No, I don’t care that you all live together. Look around. You’re in a room with other people. This thing is airborne. You are inside a building with shit for ventilation where air circulates constantly. You don’t know anything about the health conditions of the people in the room around you. You don’t know anything about the health conditions of the people in their lives. It is baseline consideration for the safety of the people around you to exercise this level of caution.
If you want to sit together with your masks off, go back to your dorm. Go outside. Don’t put the people around you at risk.
Case numbers are rising. Hundreds of thousands of people have died and, and countless more have lost the people they love most in the world. And they didn’t get to fucking say goodbye.
Don’t take that risk with my father’s life, you assholes. A healthcare worker on a college campus who’s had thirteen fucking rounds of pneumonia has a lot of fucking cards stacked against him. I’m doing everything I can, I think, I hope, but I don’t know if I’m going to make it through this thing without losing somebody, too. And I’m fucking scared.
Also, don’t call somebody a bitch for telling you to give a shit about the people around you.
Gave myself permission to feel deliriously happy and relieved about the election results, for a couple of days. Now I think I need to reign it in a little and focus.
Because I can’t just go to sleep now because Biden acknowledged the value of Black women and the existence of trans folk in his victory address. You don’t stop taking your medicine just as it starts to work, and there is still so much work to be done.
Soo, yeah… I am sitting here thinking about what “this fight isn’t over” actually means, because I honestly feel like that’s kind of fuzzy at the moment. For one thing, I did not allow myself to hope that Trump would lose, and now that he has, I am not sure what to do with myself. So much of leftist energy when I first entered those spaces was focused on *owning 45* and without that focal point, I am worried about what’s going to happen to us. To this momentum. It is so important to remember that things we’re fighting for are just as important as the things we are fighting against.
Considering what it is that I’m going to do, from here. Where to direct my energy, now that this has happened. I know I’m probably reinventing the wheel a little bit, but my brain just – handed me all of this, today. Like, “here you go.” And I thought it might help to get this out there before trying to focus on other things this morning.
Here are the thoughts that are percolating…
What are the long term implications of a Biden presidency with a republican majority in the Senate and a 6-3 majority in the SCOTUS?
How is that scenario likely to shape pandemic management, climate policy, lgbtq+ rights, the way systemic racism is addressed at a political level, etc.?
How will this presidency affect polarization in politics in general, and the agendas of future republican candidates for president of the US?
What lasting impact will Trump’s legacy have on the motherf*cking GOP?
How will this presidency effect the progressive liberal/leftist voting base? How will this effect the grassroots leftist movement?
How do I help flip the Senate blue, so that Biden’s presidency has an increased chance of being productive?
How do I as a NYS resident help get people registered to vote for Georgia’s runoff election on January 5th? What complications potentially exist, there?
How do I encourage people in GA to vote for Jon Ossoff?
How could I have conversations with voters in Georgia without having to struggle with my anxiety around taking to strangers on the phone?
Aside from directly talking to voters in Georgia, what can I do to help effect this outcome? Especially as someone who isn’t worth very much in terms of how many little green pieces of paper are rightfully mine.
What can I do with my tiny social media platform that has like – the same number of followers as students in a high school classroom?
I have finite resources to work with. Beyond money. For one thing, I’m deadass in a committed relationship with my GPA. How can I make the most impact on this outcome with the least amount of effort?
What can I do to maintain a balance between my anxiety around this outcome and the rest of everything that’s going on in my life? How do I walk the line between awareness and obsession, between productivity and pouring too much of myself into this?
What can I do to make things better closer to home?
Speaking as a tutor, I think it’s fucking amazing how the act of articulating a vague query as an explicit question can help a mind to think.
A sweet thing happened this afternoon A sweet thing worth calling up your people With a voice full of shocked and happy tears Worth opening a bottle of wine Worth punching the air Crying out in surprised joy Whispering “HOLY SHIT” A sweet thing Worth a sigh of relief A hug for your father A bottle of wine A glass raised high For the work that was done For all the momentum accomplished For the people who believed In what was right And took a stand.
A sweet thing happened today. But it was a close thing.
And there is still work to be done.
To begin with Be careful out there in the dark In the places where people are furious Where too many are furious Especially those of you Who have watched your fundamental rights Go before the courts Who are still watching those rights debated Stay safe. You already know how. I’m so sorry.
This place is still imperfect And there’s still work to be done So don’t lose that momentum. Don’t lose this spirit Of anger Of compassionate action Don’t let go of what you believe Even as you feel this relief There is still so much work to be done. So keep fighting In all the tiny ways That don’t mean very much on their own Keep believing
So that over time There will be more sweet moments Moments they can never take away.
Also it’s ironic and a little terrifying that the fate of the world is partially contingent upon what happens in Vegas, Nevada. This feels too much like the flip of a coin, except
except that it isn’t. I don’t think.
I’m trying and failing not to keep reloading the map of election results and I have not dared to let hope into my heart yet but I – hmm.
Georgia is currently tied 49.4% to 49.4%.
They’re at 99% reported.
It has just occurred to me that the difference between the number votes is literally 1902 people. That is the equivalent of maybe as many church congregations as I could count on the fingers of one hand. That’s a bit higher than the number of students at my highschool. That is a fraction of the population of the upstate NY Bible belt town with the rolling hills and the queer kids who who got the fuck out at 17 and moved to Tennessee and Virginia and Pennsylvania to start a new life, somewhere safe.
1902.
It has just occurred to me that I have probably met with, talked to, exchanged words with that many people in my adult lifetime. I’m thinking about the number of people that all of those people know. And then those people, in turn. And I’m thinking about how everything is interconnected, and how sometimes the ripples that an individual sends outward aren’t muted by the background noise in the system but once in a while there is something – a joke, a turn of phrase, a five dollar bill, a belief, or (i am so sorry) a virus – that is passed from person to person throughout these interconnected communities until it has been amplified a thousand fold.
1902 voices is barely a whisper, against a backdrop of a storm that has been raging for centuries. But that whisper could be enough to tip the scales. Right now, the scales are leaning slightly, ever so slightly away from the voice of reason and, just.
I am so fucking proud of how strong that voice of reason is.
In this moment when I feel a certain degree of helplessness, I’m trying to think of things that I actually can do to help. They are small things, but they do change the shape of the world. They’re outward facing things but mostly they’re for me to think about and remember. They might not be for you, although I got casual and decided to use the generic you. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect myself to do all of these things at once, or all the time. But they’re things I’m trying to remember that I can do, and sometimes actually am doing without realizing it, when I feel that there is no hope.
Wear a mask
Wash your hands
Get vaccinated when a vaccine becomes available
Get a flu shot
Donate blood
Stay home when you can to decrease population density in public
Don’t say things in the comments section of a social media post that you wouldn’t say to someone’s face.
Recycle
Compost
Volunteer at food distribution events
Eat vegetarian, even if you only eat vegetarian some of the time. One of the most effective ways to decrease greenhouse gas emissions.
Source meat products conscientiously if you can afford it for animal rights reasons
Make microdonations to organizations who are taking action on things you believe in
Carpool (safely)
Donate used clothing, books
Thrift shop
Check on the endorsements or social perspectives of the businesses you support consistently and be mindful of where your money is going.
Shop locally. Support that one coffee shop or bookstore or diner or performance venue you would hate to see go out if business.
Consider alternatives to big businesses like Amazon
Recognize the humanity in the folks working in food service, retail, etc., especially in those moments where you feel the need to be critical of the service you have recieved.
Support the arts. Performance based industries have been hit hard this year. Consider attending virtual performances, or supporting specific artists or venues on crowdfunding platforms like Patreon.
Exchange pronouns.
Hell, especially if you’re a cisgender ally – wear your own pronouns out on your sleeve. Wear ’em on your nametag at work, throw ’em in your email signature, etc.. It’s a small way to help make this conversation more familiar, standard, and safe in mainstream circles.
Listen more than you talk, sometimes
Other times, fucking preach. Speaking your mind is an act of revolution.
Tell a stranger how much you like their hair, or their shoes, or their outfit.
Take care of yourself. Unclench your jaw, relax your shoulders away from your ears. Take a breath. Drink water. Rest. Take a break. Put taking care of yourself first.
If somebody in your life is putting themselves first, don’t take it personally. If taking it personally is constantly your first impulse, notice that. Consider the possibility that this might not be all about you.
Learn something new, from outside of your comfort zone.
Learn about the history you weren’t taught about in school.
Sign a petition regarding a specific example of something in society that bothers you. If you are righteously passed about the criminal justice system, sign a petition for the innocent man on death row.
Regardless of whether a protest for something you believe in is happening in your city or on the other side of the world, donate to local organizations who organize for safety supplies for protesters. Or a bail fund.
Add your voice to the conversation when you amplify someone’s voice on social media.
Consider consuming your news about the state of the world from a medium which you consider to be relatively reputable.
Think critically and ask questions.
If an old perspective no longer seems right, in light of new information, think about letting it go. Or revising it a bit, at least.
One alternative to participating in a long string of potentially draining arguments or lectures that escalate and don’t get you anywhere over and over again is to just – concisely – say what you believe about the topic, and leave it at that. Repeat this statement whenever you need to. Allow it to evolve as your feelings about a topic change or become more specific. At some point, you can start asking people to repeat back to you what you’ve said. You’re not letting down the principles of nuance just because you don’t have the energy to present a research paper on what you believe in every single time.
i.e., I don’t always have the energy to get into a nuanced discussion about reproductive rights, so my go-to statement is “I think people should have agency over what happens to their own bodies, and I think this kind of medical care should be covered by insurance.”
Ask questions.
Question cancel culture.
Question the “born this way” narrative about things like gender and orientation
Don’t fall in love with politicians. Think strategically.
Protest. Change happens from the ground up, and the political landscape is shaped by what the majority of people believe to be important. A real life example of this is the youth climate justice movement in the E.U. over the last couple of years.
Protest peacefully and creatively.
Don’t tone-police protesters.
Take action in response to peaceful protest.
Learn about why people are protesting.
Don’t negate the validity of the message that protesters are trying to draw attention to by emphasizing only the actions of the most violent and radical among them.
Don’t fall out of love with healthy skepticism rational argument
Remember that just because something makes you uncomfortable that doesn’t make it evil and wrong and bad.
Hear the voice in your head that says “if you don’t do this one small thing, you won’t be able to live with yourself.” Hear that voice. And then recognize that the legitimate reason you have for being unable to take a specific action in a givin moment is not some “excuse,” it’s part of a genuine set of parameters that you’re working within. It’s human. It’s normal. The idea that if you really cared or wanted to take an action then you could just choose to take that action is abelist as fuck.
No matter what happens There’s still going to be work to do. There are still going to be things to fight for People to stand up for There’s you.
No matter what happens, there is still going to be an infinite collection Of small corners of the world Where an apparently insignificant outcome comes down, in the end To a conversation A judgement call Based on the previous inculcations Of perspective, insight, nuance, fact. Brief flashes of understanding Of things I hadn’t seen before Because I didn’t know to look These are things which, in small ways Affect everything I do All the actions that don’t seem like they mean very much By themselves.
No matter what happens, No matter which rich white man wins There’s still going to be work to do.
One path might be worlds more heartbreaking to walk than the other, Especially right now. And we don’t know yet Which path we’re going to be walking
I will walk down either path, even though I guess I could turn my back on everything And I guess this is technically a choice, to keep walking Even if I have to stop and rest periodically to keep my legs from giving out I’ll be back, on the path, when I can Because this is a choice I decided to keep making A long time ago.
And it helps me to remember Even when it’s impossibly hard to remember That I am not walking alone.
I’m sorry for the everything is terrible blog post, the other day. I’m sorry for how terrible I’ve been.
I’m kind of going through it, I think. Everything *is* terrible, but it’s beautiful, too. It’s just – everything. All at once.
I had to pay rent for this space on the internet, for a year. For this website name, for a space to write things. And my – I guess my lease is almost up. I need to decide what I’m going to do about that.
One of the things that could happen is that nothing changes. Or I could wind up with a different domain name. Or I could take a break from writing, for a while. I’m not sure what to do.
I’m going to start with a cup of coffee.
It snowed here last night. Last year when it snowed for the first time, I wasn’t home.
I can sit and drink coffee and look out the window at the snow and listen to a Hozier track from a friend I haven’t heard from in a while, unless you count the memes.
This was the result of my mother’s decision to get a puppy like a couple of months after I was born. It was a good decision, I think. We were very good friends.
Here she is, adjusting to the idea of additional house mates. She was very good about it.
Here she is in the last months of her life. We kept going for walks until the end. I still dream about her sometimes.
My mother’s mother died suddenly in a car accident when I was – three or four years old? She and my mother were angry with one another at the time. I never really knew her, but the two or three memories I have are good ones. Kathrin knew her better. Tell the people you love that you love them, because you never know when they’re going to be gone.
Based on what I know of her, second hand – I’m sometimes absolutely stone cold furious with her. But at other times I – I wish she was here, and I wish I could have a conversation with her. For all the ways that she was flawed, I think maybe she would have understood.
I have never seen a photo of my mother’s father. But I know he played the upright bass, I know that he was an engineer, and I know that he kept bees.
My dad with his parents at my parents’ wedding day.
Jay was a trip, with a lot of faults. I only remember him as a quirkey, frail old man. He was There enough to understand when my dad said “I forgive you.”
Reba (Miller) was a sweetheart, and all of the stories of my dad’s grandparents on her side suggest that she came by that honestly. I see a lot of her in my dad.
She kept diaries for her entire life. She has something like 11 grandchildren, but for some reason I inherited all of them. Someday, I will feel ready to read them.
The first time I was in the same room as death. I think I was thirteen? He was hit by a car, which is a thing that happens, here. I think I might even have heard the tires screech at the end of the road. We found him in bad shape under the porch, and did what we could for him. I remember this cat for the friendliness and cuddles and the crazy manic energy and just a faint spark of sass.
I love cats.
Death isn’t half as scary as some of the horrors within and betwixt and between human beings, and the finite-ness of life is just another reason do what we can in the time that we’ve got.
I’m reading a book about the last time Frank sat with his friends before he was put to death by hemlock poisoning. Frank & co. spent that time philosophizing and trying to prove the immortality of the soul, which they never quite managed to pull off. When Frank couldn’t successfully prove that souls were immortal, his friends were deeply troubled and uncomfortable – not just with the prospect of their friend dying, but with a sudden lack of faith in the power of logic and reason and philosophical argument in the first place.
Having to write a five page analytical essay about Frank’s response to this on All Hallow’s Eve has been unexpectedly therapeutic.
the smallest things have been tricky for me, today. sitting up in bed, thinking of answers to questions, finishing sentences, swallowing food. I’ve thrown up once, and my chest aches. I didn’t visit campus this afternoon. Case numbers are rising. I’ve been careful to socially distance and I’ve been staying outside as much as possible up till now, but I’m starting to feel this overpowering instinct to just fucking hibernate for a while. Hopefully keep some people safe.
I did accomplish one small walk in the rain. wore three layers of rain jacket and winter coat to keep the weather off, and listened to podcast in order to keep my prefrontal cortex distracted from the thoughts that I’m honestly afraid to be alone with. seriously, if you’re ever hoping to torture me, put me in a sensory deprivation tank, alone, by myself, with my brain. I wouldn’t last five minutes.
left to my own devices, I worry. for so many things. for so much.
so instead, I listened to the last podcast on the left. Three quite nerdy and older-brotherly men with the collective maturity of a nine year old boy chatting about ghosts and true crime and UFO’s and serial killers. I think I found them because of Trista’s found word operation, but I’ve been listening to them for over a year now. Their voices have become familiar and – aaaalmost comforting? Almost. As comforting as your typical gristly & enthusiastic & incredibly nsfw commentary on the intimate details of a serial killing can be.
(they’re all in their approximate thirties, i think, and in the most recent episode two of them genuinely congratulated the other one for finally teaching himself how to cook spaghetti all by himself. which was – very consistent with the vibe)
when i got inside out of the rain I managed a good enough virtual tutoring session for a classmate, today. this is very much an under the table venmo operation, socially distanced and masked out in the cold, or awkwardly screen sharing through a zoom call. I like being self employed. I’m getting paid a bit more per hour. plus my boss says I am absolutely allowed to swear profusely on the job.
and then there was food and television with my mom and dad. This is a thing that we do together, now. we ran out of the first two seasons of twin peaks, so we’ve been watching old episodes of the great british baking show. well into the semifinals, things are becoming stressful. Mary keeps having to remind Paul to be kind.
No school this weekend. Small hiatus from almost everything.
I have four fewer teeth now than I did last weekend. This happened on purpose.
I’m pretty sure that I’ve put off letting go of the wisdom teeth for this long because I had somehow subconsciously started to believe that having wisdom teeth makes a person more wise and I –
I really had to sit down and have a chat with myself about that one.
They’ve been making my head hurt off and on since I was seventeen and, for one thing, it’s a hell of a lot harder to think when my head hurts. It’s harder to remember the important things when I’m in pain.
So I found an office that would take my parents’ insurance and I called the front desk and made an appointment and scraped all the paperwork together and sent it to all of the people who needed paperwork. It took me a long time to do all of those things, and most of them were tricky and uncomfortable. The lady on the other end of the phone was an absolute sweetheart, which somehow gave me courage.
I was conscious and awake for the entire operation, which was – also very much on purpose.
Ever since I stumbled on a random article in a magazine when I was a kid, I have had a distinctly irrational anxiety about receiving the wrong dose of anesthetic in a dentist’s office, and never waking up again.
Theoretically this happens because the anesthesiologist, just another imperfect human, is distracted and very tired, tired enough to make a fatal mistake with the arithmetic, tired enough to just completely read the charts wrong. Perhaps the botched arithmaric that leads to my death is the indirect result of a bad hangover and a broken heart.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about dying. They say beggers can’t be choosers, but I don’t want my last moments to take place in a dentist’s office. I have never in my life been in a dentist’s office that didn’t feel profoundly sterile and impersonal and a bit creepy and for some reason there is always a county music station playing in the background. Every single time.
So I didn’t go under during the operation, and the experience was incredibly strange.
Once they’d gotten past the bit with the needles, I just – went somewhere else. Mentally. Away from the sticking and poking and yanking sensations. Away from the country music lyrics. I escaped. I went to the place where Westley goes, in the Princess Bride, while he’s being torchured by the man with six fingers. I went to my own equivalent of Sherlock’s mind palace. I got the fuck out.
I dissociate on a fairly regular basis, but it doesn’t usually happen on purpose. This time it did.
When I settled back into the shape of a human, in a chair, in a room, in an office, in a town, in a deeply fucked up country, in a universe that’s beautiful and terrible and strange… I asked if they would let me keep my teeth. I don’t know why. I didn’t want anyone else to have them. The words came out jumbled because I couldn’t feel my face, but they heard me and understood.
My dad drove me home and picked up meds from the pharmacy. My mother made me garlic mashed potatoes with butter and cream. Incidently, mashed potatoes made from blue potatoes are actually a neat, pretty shade of purple. This is new information for me.
My head hurts and my jaw is puffy. I have been binging BBC television and sipping mug after mug of tea, and snacking on mashed potatoes.
I needed this time.
I hope it’s an excellent weekend.
P.S.
I have a small and slightly bloody envelope with four teeth inside, and I have no idea what to do with this. Help.
Hallo! I don’t physically have to go to school today, so I slept late into the morning. When I half-awoke I knew that there had been strange dreams, but I couldn’t remember what they’d been about. My cat was worrying at my arms and face with her paws and nose, insisting that I needed to get up because she needed something. She’s nowhere near polite enough not to tell me when she needs things, even when I’m half alseep.
So I rolled out of bed and across the floor and out of the window onto the roof above the porch and conginued over the edge
And I fell, comfortably, for what felt like a long time. I could hear the radio playing NPR through the wall between me and the kitchen. They were talking about the SCOTUS nominee confirmation process, about what it felt like for an ex-convict to vote for the first time, about sending toilets into space. I was only half-listening.
I landed on my feet outside the back door, walked through it, and went looking for cat food and a cup of coffee.
I have run out of Stephen King books to read, at the moment. I think this means either a trip to a library or to an online bookstore. I have searched in two libraries and two physical bookstores for the next book in the Dark Tower series, to no avail.
When I called the village library up the hill from the college campus to ask if they had Songs of Suzannah on the shelf, the sweet old lady on the other end of the phone happily reported that they did have the book but it was down a set of rickety stairs at the back of a dusty filing cabinet in the basement. When I arrived at the library later the same day, the librarian at the counter, a severe looing younger woman, told me that they had never had that book, that the library didn’t have a basement, and that, incidently, the old woman I had spoken to on the phone hadn’t worked there for over fourty years.
The bookstore on the main drag beside the college campus has strange and unpredictable hours which are constantly changing and seem to discourage the possibility of customers, but I’ve been persistent about it and they seem to have a broader collection of Discworld installments than Dark Tower books. The man who works there, who wears a tie-died mask and is currently calling himself Larry, turned out to be surprisingly helpful and plucked a German-English dictionary for me from a shelf where I could have sworn there hadn’t been a German-English dictionary before.
I just want a spooky adventure story to read by candle light in the evenings, before I fall asleep and dream of things I can never remember afterwards.
I did not have to go to school today, not physically. I had to be there in an oddly virtual way – I took two online tests and uploaded a paper, and those turned out fine.
School exists in an invisable layer of reality – floating through the aether from one blue screen to another to another and the next. Friendships, work, school, news about unfairness on the other side the world. It all exists on a screen that is currently about six inches from my face. When I look up, my eyes are so tired that I can’t make out the details in the trees without my glasses.
I miss everything, but maybe everything has been right there the entire time. All I have to do is look up.
When I’m feeling sad and I’m crashing in the living room of my parents’ house, two other warm bodies have a tendency to gravitate towards me. The cat will curl up on my chest if I’m laying down, or in my lap if I’ve got my feet up. The dog will stretch out on the floor beside the couch. I suspect that the cat is only in it for the body heat, but I think the dog is there because of whatever it is that connects dogs to people. I don’t know if it’s love or some ancient and deeply altruistic agreement that’s gradually morphed into an instinct. Might be the same thing.
So I curl up under blankets and the bodyweight of cats, and breathe in the smell of lab mixed with a handful of other things. We think maybe some coonhound, american bulldog, possibly great dane, but we don’t know.
She sticks her nose in my face when she needs something, and sometimes even when she doesn’t. Just because. When my dad comes home, she’ll meet him at the door. They both enjoy this.
The cats come and go. They thrum and stretch, they knead and purr, they ask for attention one minute and then leave deep red scratches down my arms and back the next. In anxious moments, when I’m trying to sleep and can’t, a 20lb weighted blanket and several layers of sheets and knitted blankets are not heavy enough. A 20lb weighted blanket, a sheet, a knitted blanket and the bodyweight of a cat is heavy enough.
This random mix of nonhuman companions makes me feel less alone in a way that pretty much none of the humans have successfully achieved. I love them for that. Or at least, I experience one half of some kind of ancient and deeply altruistic agreement that has gradually morphed into an instinct.
It’s one o’clock in the morning on a school night. I should either be sleeping or writing a paper but I am currently listening to a Last Podcast on the Left episode about Gef the talking mongoose.
A couple of days ago, I woke up and looked down at my phone and checked my news feed and all of the headlines were about how 45 had tested positive for COVID-19. There is absolutely a dark part of my soul which is deeply satisfied by that outcome, and wholeheartedly appreciates the irony there.
A couple of days before that, I woke up and looked down at my phone and checked my news feed, and all of the headlines were focused on 45’s behavior at the presidential debate. About how he outright refused to condemn white supremacy. About whatever in hell’s name that was.
A couple of days before a couple of days before that, I woke up and looked down at my phone and checked my news feed, and all of the headlines were about how 45 has paid less money in income taxes than literally every other adult who has ever taken capitalism seriously. That parameter probably neatly excludes all of the rich ones.
Weirdly, this post is not about how disgusting 45 is. We already knew this. We have known this for a long time. This is not new information. Currently, I’m just incredibly done with how much attention this excruciatingly toxic human being is receiving on an almost daily basis.
Like, yes. To a point, precisely because of this enormous scope of power that he has somehow fucking managed to end up with, it is important to keep one eye on this trainwreck. A trainwreck of this scale can throw shrapnel that effects too much of the world.
And yes it would be lovely if the public attention that is being spent on 45 could help to hold him accountable for the things that he does that are wrong. It would be lovely if it managed to shift the vote just enough to sway the election. That would be a beautiful outcome.
But right now, it just feels like the entire universe is watching this trainwreck in a kind of horrified fascination and can’t bring itself to look away. If attention was some kind of currency, if fame without any particular connotation one way or the other was like an energy source for this man, he would be so fucking set. And in a sick way, I think maybe he is.
I wonder what would happen if a fraction of that universal energy and focus was transferred to something worthwhile, something constructive. I know that it would free up space in my own head and heart, on a daily basis. Imagine multiplying that free space across millions of people, across days and weeks and years.
I know we can’t ignore Donald Trump completely.
I just think there are so many other names that are worth saying more than his. I think there are at least 209,000 COVID-19 victims who were not nameless, and should have had access to the level of care that he’s currently receiving. I think there are countless victims of systemic racism and climate injustice and lack of housing and Healthcare and a livable wage that were not nameless
whose names deserve to be spoken so much more than his ever will.
Instead of focusing in on so much hate and disgust for one person, I want to be spending my energy building a world where billions of people are going to be okay. Even if I can’t do very much. Even if I have very little to give at all.
Hating him only makes me sick, and only gives him the attention that he wanted.
I want for the last time I see his name to be on the 2020 presidential ballot
I didn’t have to go to school today. It’s been lovely.
I let myself sleep well into the morning, and I would have gone on sleeping, but my cat kept on insisting that she needed something. She’s nowhere near polite enough not to tell me when she needs things, even when I am asleep.
This morning I’ve been steadily working through my logic homework. We are currently testing for the validity of arguments in system M by direct proof, which is not something I can just sit down and work on in front of the television. Still, I enjoy the way logic makes my brain feel. It’s a bit like algebra, and for the first time in a long time I’m noticing that I miss that feeling. I feel nostalgic for the almost continuous difficulty of not understanding, punctuated by short-lived moments of clarity, followed by more frustrating confusion. Those breif moments of clarity are honestly some of the sweetest, but I think it’s the other stuff that actually helps me to grow.
Because being wrong and confused almost all the time is hard for me. Not being naturally excellent at everytbing is hard for me. And it feels like a defect. It feels like an inflated ego problem, but instead of manifesting as stark overconfidence and superiority, it manifests as a toxic kind of bitterness and self-doubt.
It’s a lonely feeling, because when I’m full of self doubt and bitterness, I’m not sure I like myself very much. And I can’t shake the feeling that it’s hard for the people that I love to like me in the moments when I don’t like myself.
I’m not sure if that’s true, but it feels true, and that makes it heavy.
So I wish I could be humble, because I don’t like the bitterness and the self-doubt and the loneliness. I wish I was more graceful in a state of not knowing. I think that I miss studying mathematics because I miss the experience of having to practice humility even when that wasn’t what I was feeling on the inside. I think that was good for me.
Anyhow. I should probably stop procrastinating and get back to practicing logic things, but apparently I needed to write that one down. Thanks for sometimes reading the things that I write, even and especially when they wind up being oddly personal.
My dad used to say that if I had a question that nobody else was bringing up, I shouldn’t hesitate to speak up ask my question, because there would almost certainly be other people struggling with the same thing. That’s sort of my hope when I write about oddly personal things – I hope I’m not the only one who experiences all this awkward messy imperfect human-ness. I hope there is a connection between my experience and the experiences of a whole host of other human beings.
My parents and I didn’t watch the debates last night. This was very much on purpose. The prospect of watching 45 debate literally anyone felt like an unnecessary stress that I didn’t need to put myself through. This morning, I was grateful I didn’t do that to myself. One news anchor at CNN described that debate as a hot mess inside of a dumpster fire inside of a train wreck, and I don’t need any more of those in my life this week, thanks.
So instead of watching the debate, we watched Twin Peaks and opened a bottle of wine. It was the very first bottle of home-brewed stuff from the weirdly manic summer of Trying All The Things…
Anyway.
We opened a random half-gallon batch of cherry wine, bottled sometime around the end of July.
And I was fully expecting it to be horrible. At worst badly infected with some random strain of bacteria, gritty, turned to vinegar. At best, flat and dry and flavorless and harsh. I had myself convinced that the outcome was going to be one of those options.
But it wasn’t.
My dad did the honors. He uncorked the bottle, which made a satisfying sound, poured a glass, took the first sip. And then his face lit up in surprise, and he smiled.
I was very much not emotionally prepared for that outcome. Might have taken a couple of involuntary physical steps backwards.
A kind but smart-assed voice in my head would like to point out that constantly expecting the worst possible outcome might be a little dumb, on my part. This is the same voice that makes exasperated noises when I realize that a joke that sounded funny in my head was basically just me putting myself down, but out loud and in front of people.
I don’t know.
Hoping that things will work out beautifully is difficult. Striving for excellence is taking a risk. Believing that there is anything about me that is worth jack to anybody is so impossibly hard, because what if…
What if.
What if they do care, even when you’re decidedly messy and imperfect. What if the recipie turns out alright, or even turns out beutifully and makes your father smile from ear to ear. What if you have the capacity for excellence, at a few things, if only you can give it a little time. What if.
It’s kind of funny, but I’m actually trying to let go of both of those things. Both ends of the spectrum. I know enough about myself to know that thinking positively in a rough moment is not enough to save me from myself, but I also know that feeding a negative thought spiral isn’t going to help.
I want to get to a place where I can open a dusty bottle, try a little, and know deep in my soul that it doesnt matter if I’ve poured myself a glass of vinegar or wine.
Because I dared to try. Because that’s enough. Because that’s part of living.
Folks, I hope you have the Wednesdayist of Wednesdays.
I had to go to school today but I didn’t have to like it.
Gods, I love what that pandemic has done to the entire education system. Purely for selfish reasons. A mostly remote and asynchronous class schedule happens to work incredibly well for my brain.
“Go and read this book.” “Have you read the book?” “Yes? Can you write us a paragraph about it?” “Excellent, thank you. Goodbye.”
This semester, I don’t have to sit through two hour lectures with my feet up on the desk, knitting, doodling, crying internally, barely keeping several different anxiety spirals under control, trying miserably to concentrate… mostly drifting off into space.
I had incredibly patient differential equations professor but that is beside the point.
Now I can pause the pre-recorded lecture every seven minutes to get up and move around, scroll through Instagram’s limited collection of Johnlock memes, make a sandwich, plan a trip to Tibet, work on my elaborate but stylish plot to overthrow the government, feel the upset of the world in the pit of my stomach … et cetera, it goes on.
This morning I listened to a humanities lecture about Aristotle’s ethics at a playback speak of 1.5, though the crappy little speakers on my phone, while walking up the hill through an absolutely gorgeous cemetery.
The other night I watched a lecture about Indian cosmology under the duvet at 3AM.
You get the idea.
But Elementary German is still very much in person. Classical music plays through the speakers before class. My professor’s voice sounds like a distinctly western NY Santa Claus. In order to practice the spoken language, we have to scream across six or twelve or eighteen feet of room to other classmates. I can only see the top halves of their faces, so I can’t see their lips to catch the shapes they make when the sounds come out.
It’s like I’m living in a dream.
This afternoon, towards the end of German class, I think I worked out what it means to split an infinitive. I’d spent years of my life not knowing what an infinitive was, and pretending to know so as not to look like an idiot, while also forgetting to ever actually fucking get around to googling the damned things. But today, for some reason… today was the day when it all began to, finally, make sense.
The increasingly potent sensation is one of grief for an irretrievably lost innocence. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, until today, and now that I know what I didn’t know I can never truly go back.
It’s fascinating how you learn things when you go to school.
Anyway, I – folks, I should get offline tonight. There’ll be coffee in the morning, and that’s enough of a reason to carry on.
We just lost Ruth Bader Ginsberg. My dad told me, and I broke down a little.
In the German language, there is a word for the way that I’m feeling. Weltschmerz. It means, literally, world-sadness. Depending on the context, it can denote varying degrees of deep sadness with the flaws of life, of world-weariness. Weltschmerz is the pain of the world.
The series of unfortunate events that’ve happened in 2020 have turned this year into a sort of meme. It’s almost like a joke.
Australia was burning, and the Amazon rainforest was burning, and then Voldemort was about to start WWIII with North Korea. Then there was a novel virus that spread from bats in a cave to a wet meat market in China, and then all over the world. The world was temporarily closed. Hundreds of thousands of people died and angry republicans wouldn’t listen because haircuts and the economy were more important. JK Rowling became vocally transphobic. And then, in Minneapolis, George Floyd was killed by police, and there were Black Lives Matter rallies in all 50 states, and there was police brutality at peaceful protests. Chadwick Boseman passed away. And then Voldemort tried to shut down the post office, so that people wouldn’t be able to vote. Immigrant detention centers are feeling more and more like concentration camps and Voldemort’s rhetoric is actively encouraging this. And the west coast is on fire, and we’ve just lost our RBG.
The seat she once filled is now open.
It’s only September. Hold my hand.
I picture a moment, at New Year’s eve, surrounded by my friends. We stop playing Mario cart for long enough to count down at the tops of our lungs, and watch the ball drop. We knock back glasses of sparkling grape juice and some of us kiss and it’s extraordinary gay, and that’s okay here. All of it is. And afterwards we never speak of 2020 ever again.
But the world keeps turning and burning regardless of who’s keeping track of the years. In a way, it’ll always be like this.
In the middle of all of it, there are people who devote their entire lives to taking care of the state of the world. Once in a while, you find people who’ve spent their whole lives speaking up for those whose voices aren’t being heard.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg was one of those people. She once said that she wanted to make things a little better than they might have been if she hadn’t been there.
And she did.
Romer v. Evans, Lawrence v. Texas, Windsor v. U.S., Obergefell v. Hodges, Bostock v. Clayton.
So many others. These were moments that somehow managed to contain the opposite of Weltschmerz.
There’s a thick haze in the sky over the campus; the folks over at the radio station says it’s smoke that blew in from the fires on the west coast.
Last night there was no chance in hell that I was going to be able to lay down and fall asleep, so I made coffee cake instead. Oatmeal and spices and a thick crumbly topping again. I got all covered with flour and it was comforting.
My mom’s a night owl and it’s cold out, so she was up late in the kitchen, too.
We had things to talk about, because my folks and I are watching Twin Peaks in the evenings. I’m rewatching each episode for the mumblemumble third or fourth time, maybe, I can’t remember, it’s still good. My mom is enjoying Twin Peaks more than she thought she might; she thinks it’s good that the show deals with tough things like domestic violence and drug abuse. Maybe it’s good for those things to be out there for everyone to see, and learn to recognize.
It was good to feel able to talk to my mom.
The conversation turned towards the weight of the things that are wrong in the world right now. JK Rowling, capitalism, the shit going down at the Mexican border, the fires in the west, the tear gas at peaceful protests.
She just listens.
Since my sister went off to college, these rants are increasing in frequency and intensity. I keep catching myself in the middle of jarringly passionate social justice orations for a very small audience of two, at the dinner table. It’s like I’m trying to fill in the gaps in conversation where Evie’s voice would be if she were home.
Sometimes it’s like something else is speaking through me. Sometimes I’m not sure that I know enough about the things I’m talking about to be talking about them out loud. But somehow the energy is too much to hold back.
The cake turned out alright, anyhow.
Today I will plunge back into the world of German verbs, and the structures of sound & valid arguments, and the readings on Plato and Socrates. The world of university is easy to navigate. I am quite good at that world. I will bury myself in scholarship, up to the eyebrows, and I while I’m at it maybe I’ll teach myself how to think.
A friend thinks I should take all of my captivity to think, and learn, and express myself, and all the feelings that I have about the things that are wrong in the world, and find a place where I can do what I can to help.
I don’t have a clue where to begin.
I just hope it’s an excellent Wednesday.
“I don’t know where I’m going, I only know where to start… by just tryna keep a little peace in this heart.”
I’m not entirely sure where this day went, and it’s disconcerting.
At one point my parents got caught in the rain, while they were out walking, so I had to go and rescue them. They were grateful, and also soaked through to the skin.
Later on I went for my own walk, which had become a three mile endeavor before I looked up and realized how far my feet had carried me. It had stopped raining, then, and the sun was shining. While I was walking I cried a little. Sometimes I avoid going for walks by myself because I’m afraid to be alone with my own thoughts, out there. But once in a while I guess I have to face that.
There are people I should speak with, things that I should say and do. I’ll have to get around to them sometime if I’m ever going to be able to live with myself. But I’m honestly a little afraid. I suspect that this is human.
On the second half of my walk, I think about the grand jury in Louisville, Kentucky, who will decide if the police officers who raided Breonna Taylor’s apartment and shot her five times will be indicted. I make a mental note to study hard in German, because if this case doesn’t go the way it should, I don’t want to live in this country anymore.
I also wonder how Jacob Blake’s children are doing. I have a vivid imagination and I can put myself in the back seat of a car, watching somebody shoot my dad, and I wonder if Blake’s kids have access to free therapy. I have to believe that someone else has already thought of this, because I have to believe that there is compassion in this world, but I wonder if there is somewhere folks can donate.
I’m home now.
We’re having oatmeal chocolate cake for dinner. It’s dense, and dark, and an old family favorite. Yesterday we made a small batch and drove up to Brockport so that we could give it to my little sister for her birthday.
This evening, I accidentally cut the second cake we made for us into four pieces instead of three, and I really missed her. For about eighteen years my childhood had a face, and it was hers, and now she’s not here anymore. I feel potent sadness about this, and I am so glad she doesn’t read this blog, because she’d laugh at me, a little. I hugged her and chatted in the backseat of a car with her, last night, and I felt completed.
I’ll see her again. Sometime.
Folks, I hope you’re having an excellent Sunday evening.
“A fire in California that has burned more than 7,000 acres was caused by a ‘pyrotechnic device used at a gender reveal party’, according to the the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.”
– The Guardian, September 7th, 2020
…
All I’m saying is that if I threw myself a gender reveal party, things would absolutely wind up catching on fire. There would be explosions.
All of the explosions would be 100% accidental explosions and definitely not gleefully premeditated explosions. Would obviously do my best not to go and cause permanent ecological damage.
I think it would be lovely time, and you are all invited.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind going to school. I enjoy riding in the car with my Dad, with the sunroof open, listening to NPR and speculating about the logistics of stealing Trump 2020 signs out of all the front yards between home and the edge of the Genesee valley.
The campus itself is beautiful; it does that particular old-bricks-and-ivy aesthetic soo well, and it rambles. The buildings were built into the side of a steep hill, on the edge of the Genesee valley. The view looking west from the gazebo where an acquaintance of mine did it with a guy for the first time is breathtaking. You can see for miles. My legs are screaming from three days of walking uphill, but for that view it’s worth it.
Yesterday I found a place to sit in the shade, in the shadow of one of the older buildings. It’s one of those out-of-the-way places that everyone walks past and nobody notices, and that makes it perfect for me. I sat with my back to a brick wall, and I read about the Pythagoreans. They were an odd bunch.
But I don’t have to go to school today.
This morning I woke up from a vivid dream, and I only remember snatches of what it was about.
So I climbed out of an upstairs window and onto the roof, and then I jumped, in a calculated arc, and after about half an hour of falling comfortably I landed with an impressive splash in the middle of the swimming pool. And it was fucking cold, but afterwards I was awake.
Under the water, I poured myself a cup of coffee, at sat at the bottom of the pool, and read a book for a little while. Still working on Stephen King’s Wolves of the Calla.
At the bottom of the pool, I can’t get an internet signal, so I don’t get caught in a web of social media outlets and emails and text messages. Nobody else in the universe has worked out how to hold their breath for as long as I have. It’s a nice place to go, when I need to disconnect from everything.
When I feel hungry, I put the book back on the shelf of the library that’s at the bottom of the swimming pool, and blithely kick my way to the surface.
Everything sort of tastes like cardboard, but toast is a manageable breakfast. Fortunately, the toaster is far enough away from the swimming pool that electrocution isn’t a big concern.
That reminds me! I’ve been meaning to share a thing. I recently discovered a true gem of a pickup line, which I will never use, but will absolutely file away in the back of my mind in a dusty box labeled Just in case…
“Damn, girl, are you a toaster? Because I’d get in a bathtub with you.”
This morning I woke up from a vivid dream, and couldn’t remember what it was about… So I climbed out of the upstairs window and onto the roof, and hesitated for a second, and then I jumped, in a calculated arc, and after about half an hour of falling comfortably I landed with an impressive splash in the middle of the swimming pool. And it was fucking freezing, but in about two seconds I was extremely awake. Afterwards, I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat on the porch and read Stephen King for like an hour. The ka-tet is falling apart, because two out of three of the men don’t think it’s a good idea to tell the lady that she’s pregnant. New characters in this installment of the Dark Tower series include: a pastor from another universe who was once bitten by a vampire in Massachusetts, an infuriatingly sassy robot who refuses to tell anyone anything, and a small group of women who have perfected the deadly art of throwing dinner plates like Frisbees, in the hope of defending themselves against the wolves who sometimes show up to steal their children. Currently, I am experiencing an inexplicable craving for cold leftover vegetable pizza, and I’m honestly not sure what to do about it.
Later, there will be almost certainly pre-recorded lectures about Antigone, and more 78 page readings about the pre-Socratic philosophers of Ancient Greece. Those dead people had some mind-bogglingly incorrect ideas about the universe.
For example:
Purse your lips and blow out a steady stream of breath, as though blowing on your food to cool it down. Observe that this breath feels cool on the back of your hand. Now, open your mouth wide, and breathe out somewhat violently, like a dragon. Observe that this breath feels warm on the back of your hand.
Good work.
(Don’t do this around other people, if you happen to have the plague. Thanks.)
Anaximenes of Miletus believed, partially on the basis of what we have just observed, that everything in the universe is actually made of air. I could go into this further, but I think I’m just going to leave it at that.
Everything in the universe is actually made up of water and earth, but nobody needs to tell Anaximenes this.
So anyway so far this week, I have learned that any good philosophy must be able to stand up to some degree of criticism.
Warrior and leader, brother and son, friend and enemy, flawed character, hero, King.
You became dust, in a snap of the fingers. And then, at the end of the world, you came back.
I know that you were not the man T’Challa. I understand the difference between reality and fiction, between movies and comics and real life. I only ever saw your face in two dimensions, and in pictures. But behind that camera was a man, and behind those smiling eyes there was a spirit.
That spirit gave T’Challa life, in a way that nobody else could. Stories have power, and you knew this. You knew what you were doing. When you were T’Challa, and when you were Jessie, and when you were James, too.
Even in the middle of your own invisible battle, you knew exactly what you were doing, and you did what you did so well.
That was a gift, to every child in the universe. But especially to the children who needed to see you the most.
This is probably not going to be an easy read. That was your warning.
Something changed in me when I walked in Auschwitz. Something fucking shifted.
I’ve suspected that something was different, since then. I’ve noticed it, I’ve been more and more aware of it, but I haven’t been sure of exactly what it is.
While I was walking in that place, a seed on the ashy wind got caught, and stuck, somewhere at the edges of my being.
It maybe got stuck in the corner of my eye, got caught by the surface tension of a tiny drop of water, salty water, leaking and pooling and falling for a girl whose name was Anne.
When I was homesick among the homeless in those freezing, empty train stations, when I was barefoot in the cold, that seed was shoved down into what you and I will have to imagine as solid ground.
For a long time, the little seed lay dormant. As I traveled, as I flew home, as I slept for a handful of winter months. The seed for Auschwitz was not dead, but it was sleeping.
Just potential, that was all.
A pandemic happened, and we all stayed home.
Later on, while we were all looking at our phones, one morning, we all heard about a Black man who was killed in Minneapolis.
And the seed felt the heat of all that shock and all that outrage like the warmth of the sun, and it started to wake up.
And then a Black woman was killed in Kentucky, in what should have been the safety of her home.
And the seed took root.
The roots went down, and down, and shoved and pushed at the dirt around them. Shoved it right out of the way.
Jesus, that shit was uncomfortable. You’d better believe that it stung and poked and itched and burned. The shifting in the solid ground hurt much more than it should’ve, for such a little thing. It hurt more than it would have been possible to expect. That tiny shift in the dirt, as the roots from a tiny seed emerged, as they took up space… that shift shook me to my foundations.
It didn’t hurt like losing a life or a loved one to a police officer’s bullets, or a police officer’s knee.
It didn’t hurt like feeling the butt end of supremacy and racism at every fucking turn.
I know that it couldn’t have hurt like that, because I have never felt those things. I must be some kind of stupid fucking lucky, in a sick way, in a way that I never asked for. But my stupid-fucking-lucky isn’t some chance roll of the dice. It never was. You’d better fucking believe that my stupid-ass white fucking privilege is a thing that came to be on fucking purpose.
On Fucking Purpose.
The system was built by a few, at first, and it was perpetuated by the many, and maybe in a handful of little ways, in my own short life, I have helped to perpetuate this system, too. And, God… Learning that, feeling the weight of that, that shit is real fucking uncomfortable.
Mine is not perfect soil for the seed that was trying to grow. It never will be.
But grow it did, a little at a time. It grew slowly, and, like most living things of its kind, it grew towards the light.
Yesterday I heard the story of a Black man in Wisconsin, who was shot seven times with the bullets from guns in the hands of officers of the fucking twisted law.
Yesterday I heard the story of a father who was shot seven times, while his three children waited in the car.
He did not die. He is allegedly in stable condition in a hospital. He is paralyzed from the waist down. He has three children.
Today is August 25th, 2020. There have only been twelve days this year when the police have not murdered someone in this country. The police have killed 751 people in 235 days. Breonna Taylor’s killers are still walking free.
What in the actual, goddamned fucking hell kind of world are we living in?!
what The HELL…
That seed from Auschwitz is still only a small green shoot, with baby leaves unfurling. It’s too soon to tell what it will become, what it will grow up to be.
But the universe shook when it broke through the surface of what I used to think was solid ground.
So I think that maybe one day it will have become a tree, whose roots grow deep into packed and well-worn soil, and I like to think that maybe the branches growing towards the light will cast enough shade for weary travelers to rest a while, and breathe air that’s just a little clearer
And I’d like to think that there are other small trees in other hearts of other people, other people everywhere, because I read once that many small people who in many small places do many small things can alter the face of the world.
Maybe I sewed my seed in Auschwitz, breathing in the ashes of the dead.
But maybe my seed was sewn a little bit before then, when I picked up the diary of a young girl in a train station in Amsterdam, because I needed something to read.
Maybe that’s – not all of what it takes, but it might be a very good start.
Listen to the stories. Bear a kind of witness to the horror, the suffering, the brilliant glimmer of hope. Shed a tear, or become angry, or feel so much love for a stranger that it hurts.
I wanted to end this with some kind of cry for justice, for protest, for change. But I think the picture of the trees is all I have to give, tonight. I can’t give up on believing that there are other trees, growing in the hearts of other people.
I hope there is something that’s growing in you.
#saytheirnames – Anne Frank, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Jacob Blake. 🖤
My therapist asked me for a safe place. “Visualize yourself there,” she tells me. “Even if it’s difficult. It gets easier with practice. Some day, when you need to, you’ll be able to imagine yourself there at will.”
So, in my imagination:
I am sitting on a driftwood log, on the pebbly shore of a cove on the east side of Seneca.
I know that this pebbly shore is on the east side of the lake because the sun sets in the west, and I remember that the sun always used to set on the other side of the water, across from us, every evening without fail.
In my memory, waves broke on the shore in a steady rhythm. They’d come rolling in from somewhere in the middle of the great wide stretch of water. At the edge of the water, seaweed collected in a thick, wide swath of green. There would always be lake-smoothed bits of colored glass, and shells, and bones, and sticks of wood, washed up and waiting. There, at the place where the seaweed meets the fine, dark pebbles, you might find a dead fish, rotting, or pools of green water, or the perfect stones for skipping, flat and smooth and round and light.
I can hear the surf, crashing, constantly and gently. I can summon up the shoreline in as much detail as I want to: the sharp curve of the beach, the steep bank between the grass and clover beside the cottage and the shore, the ancient willow tree, the creek. I can see the old wooden dock. It isn’t there now, but it used to be, and I remember. In my imagination it’s as battered and sturdy and real as it was when I was a child – the rough, wide, splintery boards, the mist-soaked beams, the thick round pillars half-submerged in shallow water, growing thick with zebra muscles and lake-weeds.
I am sitting on a driftwood log, bare feet resting on fine, warm pebbles. The sky is overcast and grey and it might rain, and the lake is calm and dusty grey and deep and faded blue, and the surf is rushing in, the waves are breaking in their steady rhythm.
This is a good place, for me. A meeting place, for all my splintered selves. There at the edges of things, at Seneca’s edges, is about as safe a place as there’s ever going to be.
“In this life, in this life, in this life We leave a trail that’s far and wide Good or bad, bad or good Our memories decide There are some places where I’ve been Where you can still see the world Think to myself as I look at the stars Just who do you think you are Innocent, innocent no more I saw what I saw and I shut the door Innocent, innocent no more I knew it was wrong but I did it some more In ’78 I went through a rude spell I knew it was fate, but I couldn’t really tell I thought that this was the way it was always gonna be I hated everyone and everyone hated me In ’88 I went through a great spell I knew it was fate, but I couldn’t really tell I knew that this was the way I wanted it to be I loved everyone and everyone loved me Every action has a reaction Every life has a life to lead Every human needs a fancy reason Why they should live or breathe I sit here feeling sorry for myself For one thing or another I’m trying hard to blame somebody else For the miseries that I’ve discovered I make a wish over a boiling cauldron That I pass only strengths onto the children And may the spirit move me to laugh and to sing And I won’t be drowned by the little things Until the day when there are no more desires And I put out all my little fires There’s nothing left but a wishful song And there will be no right or wrong Until that day, until that day, until that day Sights and sounds they’ll get to me…”
credit for this photo is my mother’s. I like the shutter speed
Getting into cold water is not something I can do a little at a time. It has to happen all at once – over in a moment, bing bang boom, it’s done, you can open your eyes.
Beforehand, I can sit at the top of the ladder for several minutes, with my back to the sun, feeling happily apprehensive about the prospect of the cold. I can dip my toes in, for a moment, to get a feel for what I’m in for. I can hesitate. That’s fine.
But the decision to get in the water is something that’s usually happened long before I reach the ladder. This can be a strange mix of helpful and frustrating, in that moment when I’m actually about to jump, standing up, bend at the knees, and shove
you’re in for it now, hon.
Once the water is over my head, it’s easy. The brain and the body adjust, and it’s nowhere as bad as I thought that it might be, and this is fine, this is good, fuck it’s cold, reach out and stretch the arms and legs and touch the bottom and stand up straight and shove a mess of wet hair out of the eyes and continue to swear for a couple of minutes and breathe
breathe
and this is alright.
surrounded by the water, there’s a certain weightlessness, a strange resistance, a persistent shift and tug, a cool and gentle force that nudges and shoves and brushes against bare skin and clumsy limbs
let it pick you up and carry you away, like a hurricane wind in slow motion. you can stay here as long as you need.
