Don't think twice, it's alright

It’s my last day at the job. Everything is in place. My things are cleared away, files deleted or passed on, keys out on the table. My blonde little replacement is sitting up front, doing her thing as if she’d been here for forever.

I am thinking about grey.

The woman who has made my life a living hell for the past year got me a goodbye hubcap. Yes, a hubcap. My car only has three. I came to work this morning and there was a card and a hubcap on my desk. The thoughtfulness overwhelms me. Amongst all other things, she is and has been kind. Crazy and obsessive compulsive and controlling, but kind too. And considerate. She is, to me, the living proof of my thoughts today.

You cannot divide life into black and white, good and evil. Nothing is wholly one or the other. The Yin/Yang concept of Eastern philosophy makes sense, but I think it’s even more muddled than a simple black and white divide. We bring it all to the table, every day. The upbringing of our parents, the neuroses of our histories, the scars and fears that haunt our footsteps, our anger, our savage competitive drive. The sunsets we’ve seen, the small kindnesses and miracles that have been bestowed, a kiss on the forehead, an unexpected birthday phone call, empathy, a loaf of homemade bread, a funny movie. All of it muddles together.

How do you know when it is time to go? I am learning to recognize the signs. The things that were once exciting and new are tinged with the pain and cynicism of regrets and unforeseen costs. The worn-in tired feeling. The lack of surprise for any bad turn. They have treated me with unkindness, with blindness, and deceit. They have also paid for me to live and walked with me and lived alongside me as life has passed by these two years. Often it has not been good to be here, especially in this last year. But just because it has not been good, doesn’t mean it hasn’t been worthwhile.

I have had a lot of time to research and grow. I have had the good examples of successful women who try to balance careers and families and how to do that and how to ask for things and not be considered a bitch. I have had a space to put my things and expand. I’ve walked around this block hundreds of times. I’ve gotten flowers here and kissed boyfriends and had absolutely awful days where the fact that there was work to be done was all that saved me from wallowing in despair.

It’s time to go. It’s time to go. I am so thankful for the going. I am scared too.

It’s never simple. You can love people who hurt you and feel sadness at leaving a job that made you unhappy and feel nostalgia for places you couldn’t seem to get away from fast enough. But I’m grateful for the complexity of it.

I was here.

On blogs

I blog. I read blogs. I think blogging is an important and amazingly personal way to connect with incredibly smart people around the world that one would otherwise have not been exposed to.

Every great intellectual movement of the past has involved a relatively small, diverse group of individuals putting together ideas and collaborating with one another. Consider in America the transcendentalists; Emmerson, Thoreau, etc., who knew and spoke with one another. Or in Paris, the philosophical circles of existentialism headed by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. We have always relied on one another for support-- for other heads on which to bounce our ideas. I personally view blogging and reading blogs as the modernist equivalent (at least in capacity) to such collaborations. Blogs are, when they are at their best, discussions about concepts and ideas. They are a way to pass on news, to report from one's window the world outside that may not be available to others elsewhere.

Thanks to blogging, I have a better understanding of history and it's implications in modernity. Thanks to blogging, I am able to access some of the smartest and most informative political and legal opinions in the nation. Thanks to blogging, I am able to learn about international issues in Africa and elsewhere. Thanks to blogging, I get tough grammatical questions answered. Blogging is a support system for feminism. And sometimes, it's just plain fun.

I don't think it's a waste of time. I don't think it's frivolous.

Love Obama today

So much has been said lately about the arrest of Professor Gates in his own home. I don't and haven't felt like I've had much to contribute on the subject. I read the police report, listened to Sgt. Crowley, and read many responses on my favorite race blogs, such as Racialicious and Racism Review, and basically came to the conclusion that while I think both parties escalated the conflict, Sgt. Crowley, who I do not think is a racist, clearly demonstrated that just because you may think that you're not racist, doesn't mean that you don't act in ways that reinforce racism in America.

If anything, for me, Sgt. Crowley is a good example of how all of us, especially those who are in the business of helping others (police, social workers, politicians, healthcare workers), need to actively seek out our own deep-seated unquestioned biases. Whether it's latent racism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc., we all have deep ugly parts that, if unquestioned, can and will hurt the very people we are trying to help. I think this is an example where a pretty good man (Sgt. Crowley) was put in a situation where some of his unquestioned biases surfaced to bad effect.

Anyway, last week, I was both heartened and annoyed at Obama for his comments on the issue. Heartened because he commented, stood up for Gates, and bravely asserted that race relations are still a sensitive issue within our supposedly "Obama post-racial era." Annoyed because he so blatantly did NOT have all the facts on the situation and yet made a judgment call which then escalated the entire conflict.

Today he apologized. Said he was sorry he'd spoken without the full amount of information needed to comment on the subject. Talked to both Gates and Crowley and tried to smooth over things on both sides. Defended his decision to comment on the situation and still stuck with his original defense of Gates, which I thought was commendable. He is the world's most powerful man and he is a black man. I'm glad he's involved in conversations about race. His is a needed voice.

He said sorry. Why do I love politicians that know how to say sorry? And not just over big, youcaughtme sorts of things, but over something seemingly small that he didn't have to take on? Because it means that he is still listening. And a president who is still listening to anyone outside his advisers is a better president BY FAR than any we've had in recent years.

He didn't lie when he said he was big on communication. And I love him for it, even if I don't always agree with him.

*Update: This is a crucial blog for anyone who has any interest in the concept of implicit racism.

On Snobbery.

I am slightly pretentious. Or-- let me start that again-- I have been known to be slightly pretentious when it comes to reading books.

I didn't begin that way. Growing up as the oldest child in an almost Victorianly strict household, reading provided some of my deepest joy and wonder. I devoured everything I could get my hands on. Books were consumed two, three, four times a piece and puzzled over- even the ones I didn't like or understand, such as "Are You There God, It's Me Margaret" which, to my 9-year old Mormon mind, seemed completely incomprehensible.

I don't know where the sudden snobbery in reading came from. I think it started in college somewhere. I began undergrad as an English major and was thereby subjected to literary snobbery at its epicenter, where one could not be considered a true appreciator of the art if one preferred say, Barbara Kingsolver, over a compilation of literary analyses on King Lear. We took Emily Dickinson, (up until that point one of my favorite poets) and picked apart her spindly little poems until they were so many letters of the alphabet lying on the ground. My professors were big into postmodernist constructions. Somewhere along the line, reading became less of a pleasure and more of a goal.

This is not to say that my post-collegiate years have been spent soley slogging through ridiculous "works of literature"- which is always what you call a book you hate. I've read some really great books in my quest for literary snob of the year.

Robert Bolano, however, broke me of snobbery, I hope, forever.

If you are not familiar with Robert Bolano, he is a Spanish author whose post post-modernist novels have caused critics the world over to rave about his "genius." His novel, 2666, was published post-humously and in unfinished form, yet was hailed as one of the books to read in 2008. So, I picked it up.

The novel is ginormous. Probably 1200 pages. I'd like to say that there's a plot, but there really is not. It is better seen as a compilation of stories that may or may not bleed into one another and then abruptly end. It's monolithic. It's dry. It's post postmodernism.

I didn't finish it. Around page 400 I thought it was going to turn around and get good. At page 857, I gave up. Slogging through 200 pages in which Bolano details the murders and rapes of the women of Sonora, I began to get indignant. Seriously. THIS is what we consider good literature these days?

N+1 has a good op-ed piece about Bolano that pretty accurately characterizes his style:

Why then, you begin to wonder, are you reading these books? What for, if they are each going to eschew psychology, characterization, pretty language, and neat conclusions, and if the narratives are all to devolve into shaggy-dog Iditarods mushing after some fugitive poet or novelist about whom—even if he ever turns up—we learn next to nothing? Why read and write at all if these empty Chinese boxes constitute the only goods ultimately in receipt?

In Bolaño, literature is a helpless, undignified, and not especially pleasant compulsion, like smoking. At one point you started and now you can't stop; it's become a habit and an identity. Nothing is so consistent across Bolaño's work as the suspicion that literature is chiefly bullshit, rationalizing the misery, delusions, and/or narcissism of various careerists, flakes, and losers.

Why indeed? As I started reading about yet another Sonoran woman, 5 feet 7 inches, anally and vaginally raped, throat slit, found out a trash heap, I recollected back on a piece of advice Stephen King doled out in his marvelous little book, "On Writing." Life's too short to read crap. With the millions of great books in the world, reading something you don't like is a waste of time.

And so I put it down. Since then, I've read a ton of great books and a couple really terribly written junk-food novels- pretty much nothing that would qualify to be on the world's list of 100-Most Influential books of our time and I've pretty much enjoyed all of it. Influential is overrated. I want a good story, beautiful writing, and characters I can get into.

Robert Bolano, you can kiss my ass. Thank you.

Nylons at 96 degrees


itch.

chafe.

stick, slick with sweat, like some oppressive second skin refusing to shed.

the urge to peel

or rip

tear

-anything! to remove that silken suffocation-

best intentions (the careful, shimmied application; nightstand corners and jumping dogs successfully avoided)
are quickly shot to hell

in hot pursuit

of relief.

god,

the relief.

Bebakhshid

Response

Shapely Prose-- a blog that I absolutely adore for its commitment to changing the way we view weight, fat people, and weight-loss-- has the following post up today:

I’m talking to a reporter who’s doing a story about what “messages” celebrities send with their weight-loss/weight-gain narratives. In her own words, she wants to know: “What was your reaction to Kirstie Alley’s and Oprah’s latest revelations? Did their descriptions of the shame and humiliation they felt about it make you feel normalized? Hopeless? Angry? Other?”

I wanted to include my response here:

I think the first response I had to both Oprah and Kirstie Alley was simply questioning why they continually choose to share their "pain" and "humiliation" with the rest of us. Do they think that their bodies are some type of report-card grade that has to be authorized by the general public? These women, especially Oprah, are pretty private about many areas of their personal lives- why do they feel their bodies are public property? Kirstie Alley's fame for the last decade or so has been based solely on her weight loss and weight gain, so it's not surprising to see another tabloid cover confession, I guess I just wonder why she allows that to be marketed to the degree that it is when she is a talented actress and undoubtedly has other things going on in her life aside from her weight.

Society has an ongoing conversation about younger celebrities who market themselves with their bodies (e.g., Paris Hilton/Kim Kardashian's fame spawning from sex tapes), but I think that Oprah and Kirstie exemplify the same cultural pressure to submit their bodies to scrutiny in the name of fame that the younger generations do; except, rather than being directly tied to their sexuality, it's to their weight (which is then connected to sexuality, but also a whole host of other "ills" such as laziness, selfishness, and stupidity). It's like they're Weight Sluts. We can envy Oprah for her billions, her fame, her success, her life, as long as at the end of the day we feel like we're better than her- that lazy, stupid bitch who can't keep the weight off.

Update: Was interviewed by the New York Times for my commentary. We'll see if I am actually quoted in the article that they post. Either way, I'll be posting a link to the article to this website as a way to further this interesting conversation. :)