My insurance company is of the nature to be confusing, and other possibilities

My insurance company sent me a letter yesterday that instantly woke up my anxious angry side. 

In it, in cheery blue rows and columns, were some numbers that add up to them deciding they are not responsible to contribute any payment toward a minor medical procedure I needed recently.

Today as I thought about this, I heard in my mind some phrases I encountered in Thich Nhat Hanh's writing once, the beginning of what he called the Five Remembrances: I am of the nature to get old; I cannot escape old age. I am of the nature to get sick; I cannot escape sickness. I am of the nature to die; I cannot escape death...

And it made me think of how in Al-Anon, I have often heard and read people talking about re-tuning their expectations. For example, "I have stopped expecting an alcoholic to keep every promise." Coming to terms with reality and expecting what is probable, an alternative to being heartbroken or angered over and over by a predictable happening. Choosing to make peace when making a change is not within your power.

That type of emotionally tuned-in realism has been very hard but interesting for me to start adopting as a perspective on life. I have approached life very differently in the past, been a person who ran things into the ground out of excess will to keep them running, a person who ran herself into walls out of anger that they existed. 

Someone in a different program (AA) wrote something about this that I also return to in my mind, because it felt so true for me when I read it:

"...I hold on. I fight. I resist. It doesn't even matter what I resist; there is simply something in me that tends to resist things as they are. I have been fighting since I was very small. And I believe that my addiction was a response, in some measure, to the fact that the fight was futile, and I could not tolerate the fact that I didn't control the world. I could not, or would not learn to accept it."

- Marya Hornbacher

Waiting

So all that comes down to: tomorrow I will call my insurance.

And: today I'm turning over the possibility that my insurance company is of the nature to be confusing. My insurance company may be of the nature to make unjust decisions or mistakes. My bus is of the nature to be late. My customers are of the nature to send me emails about errors my company made with their orders. My coworkers are of the nature to make errors. 

(I imagine saying to myself, Ah, a complaint, right on schedule, instead of getting worked up.)

Expecting these things feels like turning a literal corner in my mind. It feels quite different from expecting perfection and being angry when something goes wrong. It feels like quite a relief.

"So remove your judgments whenever you wish and then there is calm - as the sailor rounding the cape finds smooth water and the welcome of a waveless bay."

- Marcus Aurelius

Meditations

Little laundry magic/musing on materialism

I read a novel this summer about English prisoners of war on a forced march through Malaysia during World War II, and right after reading a description of how the POWs' clothing was beginning to fall apart, I took a break to take my laundry out of the washing machine. And I felt such gratitude then for every piece of clothing. I took them out of the washing machine one by one and shook each piece out carefully, shaking out the wrinkles, shaking off any lint, and imbuing it with my grateful attention.

Often I look at my clothing in terms of do I like this item?/do I have too much clothing?/what clothing do I not have that I want? and it felt wonderful to instead appreciate the way each one accomplishes something needed. I have made this little ritual a habit now whenever I do laundry, because it just feels good.

In the last couple years I read something (I really wish I could remember where!) about how the way people in consumerist societies approach objects is not actually materialistic, because what we are obsessed with is the non-material qualities we think these objects will bring us - happiness, beauty, respite from worry, the respect or admiration of others, a better lifestyle, etc.

In fact, we tend to have very little appreciation for physical objects as such, for the materiality of a thing - how it feels to our senses, what it physically does for us, how long it will last, how we must care for it. The writer suggested that if we were all truly "materialists," as we are accused of being, we would have far healthier relationships with material objects. This struck me and really aligns with how I regard my possessions now - and even my physical self.

Strange sun today

Amidst the wildfire smoke, there was a strange sun out this morning - dim and orange, not illuminating the apartment as well as it usually does. Walking outside I felt like I was in a weird dream where a blood moon had become overly bright. 

My CSA newsletter notes that the smoke is affecting the yield from plants on their farms and I wonder if it's because of the strange quality of light I am observing here.

I have been thinking about climate breakdown, of course. It's not just the wildfires, and the way they now strike in areas they weren't seen in before, but the two heat waves one after the other, and the long drought that presaged these wildfires. 

I've been thinking about the Flight Free campaign, in particular, I think because I've been hearing a lot about plane journeys recently. Many people seem to find it unthinkable that someone with sufficient means would refuse to travel by plane. (It's my right as a middle-class millennial to travel, travel, travel, isn't it?)

(I have a lot I could say about consumerism and travel, maybe another time. I remember starting to say something here a long time ago.)

Thich Nhat Hanh refers to the sun as a second heart, "that great heart outside of our body," and the forests of the world as our lungs outside our bodies. He says this about environmental destruction: "We are imprisoned in our small selves, thinking only of the comfortable conditions for this small self, while we destroy our large self."

Similarly, I recently treated myself to a book by Ffiona Morgan - a old-school feminist witch, and the designer of the wonderful, beautiful Daughters of the Moon tarot deck - and found a place where she wrote about how women's bodies mirror the living earth, microcosm and macrocosm of the same divinity, "Goddess Within, Goddess Without."

And I'm recalling Ocean Country, a book about a Bay Area woman exploring the effects on climate breakdown on the oceans. She wrote that in the age of global environmental crisis, what we consider home must be bigger. What we consider family must be bigger.

When I breathe in ideas like this, I find it hard to feel deprived by a life that treads more lightly. It feels like not doing physical harm to my own flesh or bones. It feels like connection and devotion (to self, home, family, reality, our future).

I'm not sure what difference my choices make - that's okay. Sometimes it feels ironic how much attention I give to making the little pieces of my life more environmentally friendly, only to be confronted with a roommate or neighbor or family member who has far more room for impact than I do and thinks far less about changing their ways. But I won't be unhappy in the end, no matter what - I value the sense of the world that my choices give me, and they are good for my spirit.

Mapping lately

A never-published post from November 2011.

I was feeling poorly two weekends ago and didn't leave my bedroom much, so I decided to tell you about its walls, where I have been keeping track of some ideas and words I've been connecting. Topical mapping, I suppose. I didn't get to finish this post until now, though.

The north wall is the happening one lately. The theme is narration. The relationships between narration, past and present, self as subject, and on.

I want to know: the integrity of a life, of a person's experiences, how we find it. We want to understand it before we tell the story, but how can find that clarity without the process of telling the story?

We don't know how to find meaning outside of our conception of unidirectional time, which is to say, an objectified past, a past that we can act upon and master.

The process of narration, self-narration, in order to glimpse an in-process version of that integrity.

"The Puritan use of the spiritual journal to 'frame' life is a technique to forestall the incomprehension seemingly entailed by our 'continued existence,' to achieve some sense and articulation of a life's shape even as it is being formed — to see, if only through a glass darkly, something recognizably meaningful, something useful to us as we attempt to navigate the often troubled waters of experience" (Jacobs).

I realized that the word "journal" is from the Latin root of "diurnal." By the way.

Have you ever felt the grief of thinking, There is nothing story-like about this? "The clumsy and apparently meaningless bludgeoning of much of real misfortune and the prosaic littleness which usually rob real sorrows of their dignity..." (Lewis).

That clarity — an intense sense of integrity of experience, a certainty that "everything has been leading up to this" and an understanding of just how — you can take certain drugs to get that feeling. Isn't that weird?

I'm interested in the ways that we deal with and act upon the past, through retrospection and "re-vision": "the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction" (Rich). Interpretation and reinterpretation. Continuity versus rupture.

And the way the past acts on us. The "pastness of the past" and the persistence of the past (Persistence of Memory?), which, "of course, presses on the living from all sorts of directions and in any number of ways..." (Keane).

Shared narratives versus individual narratives, and what is lost and gained in dressing one's experiences in shared narratives. "[L]ocal social realities that cannot be fitted into any overarching narrative...without doing some violence to those realities" (Keane again).

Academically: I want to write a paper comparing second-wave feminist consciousness-raising with Protestant conversion narratives.

Personally: I think I am constantly retelling the stories of my life to myself, changing them a little bit each time so that the sense and coherency of them is constantly becoming more accurate. I need them to make sense. INTP drive for understanding combined with the INFP search for meaning. You know how we do.

- 11/27/11

A tickle beneath my skin

A quiet restlessness and curiosity, a feeling like I am growing, or have been and now need a new skin. I need to change a few things up. I need to do something different. Something new or something again. Some things, differently, new and again.

I am pondering:

*What is good and lovely in my life right now?

*What am I hungry for more of? 

*What do I want less of, what am I feeling ready to let go of? 

*What practices/habits/relationships that I have let go of do I want to revive?

And I am listening carefully to myself so I can shrug off the things that I only should or could want. (A "real" job, muscle tone, to be more organized and ambitious with my online presence again, a more versatile wardrobe, etc.) The kind of discontent that comes from standards set by external sources is usually a consumerist urge. It is not the healthy, growing kind of itch and will not mature into contentment if I work to satisfy it (and working to satisfy it will not be satisfying) — it will just persist and maybe even grow larger. "Good enough for me" and a turning to focus on what is truly interesting and energy-giving is the antidote for that.

Radio silence

It's been hard to write recently. Anything, anywhere. I have plenty to say, but I don't know who to say it to, so I don't know how to say it, how to begin. (Should it be a letter? If so, to whom? Shall I carve it down into a series of 140-character musings? Do I need to journal it out, do I wish to save it to tell to my love, could I write a blog post?)

I owe words. Letters especially are overdue. I hope my dear correspondents who are reading this will forgive me. Words written or typed sustain (and are the historical foundation of) so many of my relationships, I feel like I'm failing everyone a little bit lately with this silence, including myself.

Perhaps I just need to be less black and white, and instead begin somewhere (anywhere, anything). Perhaps I need also to pare down my commitments with regard to communication.

I'm still taking pictures. I'm behind on posting my 365, but not on taking the photos. You'll see them.

I'm still here, anyway.

Why I take pictures (one reason)

Documentation can take me out of the moment or it can help me sink deeper into it. That's determined, I think, by whether I am doing it more for the product (the photo, the poem, etc.), which will exist only in the future, or for the process, which can take place only in the present.

And the process changes me; it changes the way I think and see and live.

Even if I don't have a camera, even if I don't take the picture, or even if the picture doesn't turn out — the fact that I often do have a camera and sometimes do take pictures puts me in the habit of asking, as I live my moments, is this beautiful / is this interesting / will i miss this when it's gone? Questions which keep me receptive and paying attention.

Miles

I am never separated from people anymore, even when I fly far away from them.

Not that it's not different, being friends with someone faraway as opposed to someone close, but I have a cell phone and a webcam and so does most everyone I know; we don't lose each other.

So I only leave places, not people, which is maybe why it hurts so much: because I'm not used to having to give one thing up to have another, but that's what you have to do when you go, because we still haven't figured out how to be in all the places we love at once.

I'm a San Franciscan; it comes naturally to me to think of leaving my heart when I leave places I love (we have that song and all). And it hurts, like I imagine it used to hurt when you left a person you loved: an obsolete ache that has been felt by too much of humanity for too much of history to dissipate so quickly — so it echoes.

A confession regarding travel

I am torn about going to Ireland this year...I am always torn about international travel, since early in 2010 when I made a decision to reconsider it.*

I have a sense that international travel has become the new "doesn't count as consumerist" consumer good for Classy, Educated, otherwise non-acquisitive people.

But I don't think it is an unquestionably fine choice to make. And while I pass no judgment on you, it's really important to me to be consistent in practicing what I believe.

There the issue of environmental realism, for one. Flying from one continent to another uses up a lot of petroleum (see also: oil wars) and emits some truly nefarious gases.

There is the question of how I, a person who aspires to live simply and in a way that does not belie my support for economic redistribution, ought to earn and use money.

I want to practice contentment. I don't want to consume senselessly, even of things like travel that I really enjoy. I don't want to accept my entitlement to do things that, in the equitable world where we could all afford to do them, would be environmentally unfeasible for everyone to do.

Certainly what one person chooses to do has little effect on the rest of the world, but still. Impact aside, being consistent, asking the questions, makes me much happier than having everything I "want" does.

I still have not made a permanent decision about international travel, but the question and the unease will not leave me alone. (It's part of the reason why I turned down the internship in Uganda last summer.) So I take it seriously.


*I say "international" because in a USian context that's mostly synonymous with intercontinental/really long-distance. I'm not sure where I would draw the lines. 

Academia and the intellectual life

This time last year, I thought I wanted to go to grad school. I was studying philosophy and culture theory and feminist theory for the first time in any depth, and I was in love. As I am still. My desire to read fiction has been shockingly low for the past year or so, just because I've been stumbling into so much compelling and urgent-feeling nonfiction.

Really what I think I want, though, is to have a life full of learning and theory-making and hard thinking and books and intellectual conversations and letters, an intellectuality never partitioned from daily life, from creativity or love or politics. And  I can see so much more clearly after a few months out of undergrad that these things do not belong solely to academia. Or even primarily to academia. To have learned how to read dense writing, and to have rigorous-thinking friends, that goes a pretty long and beautiful way.

On blogging / Against compartmentalization

I wonder sometimes what this site is. It's not my journal, but it's not unlike a journal. I would never want to say that it's about me, so I resist calling it a personal blog.

But it is all personal. My intellectual pursuits, my artistic pursuits, they are no less personal than my emotional life or my relationships with family and friends. These things are not even distinct from each other. What I do and what I think and what I make, who and what I love, where I go, what I see, what I believe...it's a big wild soul-party of connection and mutual influence and engagement. It's kinda dialectical. Grounded theory.

I proceed from myself and my life. Always. Who doesn't? What other starting point is there?

It might be tidier, to my mind, if I could compartmentalize in my blogging life. Here's where I talk about my daily life, here's where I get to be a feminist, here's where I talk about embodiment and eating and mental health things... 

But it's impossible. Any divisions I made would be false and unsatisfying. So I'm not drawing any lines — except for the one between what I can write publicly about without facing significant, negative, not-worth-it consequences for my offline life, and what I can't.

Because as my "About" page used to say, this space is not only "about" the unity of experience, emotion, intellect, and creativity that I find in my days, it's also one of my tools for clarifying that unity. Which is to say, precisely as I need and like it.

On the process of exercising our own voices

"...[T]he same thing happened to me that has happened to many other women who've set out initially to recover lost and silenced feminine voices. Too constrained or timid or plain bewildered to speak for ourselves, unready, perhaps, to open certain doors in our own consciousness, we take the part of another...and break her silence. It might be our mother or grandmother, a woman of our own ethnic background or religious tradition, or one who has undergone a significant experience that we have, too, like illness, divorce, conversion, or exile. We choose our alter egos carefully and practice ventriloquism under the guise of scholarship or journalism, and eventually, often before we realize what's happening, we've begun to exercise our own voices."

– Carol Lee Flinders
At the Root of this Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst

This rings true for me. For you?

I thought first of Faith's recent post on sexual harassment and fear, because she expresses anger on behalf of her younger sister in it — though I don't want to impose Carol Lee Flinders' analysis on her.

The incident that comes to mind from my own life: the sadness and anger I felt when I overheard my younger cousins assessing their bodies with the most ancient-sounding of sighs. Before I could recognize my own eating disorder as outrageous and grievous, before I could want health and peace for myself, I had to want it for them. And so I spoke about them, and a year later was ready to repeat my sentiments on my own behalf as well.

It is beautiful and right to become angry for others and advocate for them. And it is most beautiful and most right when it reminds us to expect and demand no less for ourselves — because it is consistent, because justice belongs to everyone, because we deserve no less than anyone else does. No less.

The next time you eat something sweet, fatty, or high-calorie...

1.
I saw a sign at Panera that say, "Only [xxx] calories for the entire meal."

What an odd phrasing, I thought. I wrote it down.

I recently saw the exact same formulation in another food ad recently. Don't remember where.

It's how we normally talk about money, e.g. "Only $4 for the entire meal." The "for" indicates an exchange, that you must give up something in order to get and eat the food. And that's why it's weird.

You lose money when you buy something to eat. But do you lose calories when you eat it? Of course not. You get calories when you eat something. Calories are not the cost of eating; calories are the core benefit of eating. The calories are what you're paying for.

2.
There were a couple times at college where I was concerned about money. That was a new thing for middle-class white USian, mostly-supported-by-her-parents me. And a revelatory experience for my relationship with food.

I remember walking through the grocery store, laughing at the 100-calorie packs — no thanks, I'd prefer a snack that doesn't leave my stomach growling — and declining to go to the gym, because spare calories are a luxury, and calories are a gift with enjoy a few more hours of life! written on them, and because calories are awesome and I'm grateful for them.

3.
I would like to do an inventory of a supermarket. Measure the cost/calorie of each item, and then compare the marketing across different cost/calorie levels.

4.
Those of us with the means to be well-fed act as though "post-calories" comes along with "post-industrial." But calories are energy. We'll never be post-calories. Not even the diet industry's best successes at creating anti-fat panic can change that. Humans need a given amount of calories, no matter how fat they are or how passionately they would like to be thinner. A low-calorie lunch means you'll need a higher-calorie snack or dinner, and exercising doesn't mean you "get" more calories to "spend" later; it means you need more calories.

5.
The next time someone or something tries to shame you for eating something sweet or fatty or higher-calorie,  let yourself be puzzled, because it is puzzling.

The human body knows how to find find equilibrium over the course of a few meals or a few days, so that you get just the right amount of calories for you. Do they not understand that? Or do they think that shame can lower a human's basal metabolic rate?

The next time you eat something sweet and fatty, remember why it tastes so delicious. It tastes delicious because it is the assurance that you will continue getting to be alive. And that is something for your body to be happy about.

2012: Intentions

I'm thinking about the word elegance.

Elegance in the way my geometry teacher used to mean: like an elegant proof or an elegantly concise definition.

And the word silence, in particular, comes to me. I had to consider it for a few days to understand the connection.

Elegance means setting what is essential off with spaciousness, emptiness, so that you can see/hear/understand the essentials properly and appreciate how spare and simple they are are by nature.

Silence is the aural equivalent of space, and I crave it. I crave these kinds of sensory empty spaces. Deep winter, silence, bare rooms, dusk.

(My senses get overwhelmed easily.)

(I remember: the silence and pale colors and expanses of Iceland in early winter.)

Elegance is also deliberateness. I would like to remember to do less by default, to choose what I do and how. And then, to choose to do less of what I don't care about, and do what I do care about more simply, more beautifully, with more focus.

More elegance.

You / I

"do you remember the way the girls
would call out 'love you!'
conveniently leaving out the 'I'
as if they didn’t want to commit
to their own declarations."

– David Berman (via)

My thoughts as I read this:

1. I do that.

2. It does feel more comfortable and less meaningful.

3. Resolved: no longer. Subject pronouns or bust. Let words have weight; I love you.

At 22, in the company of so great a cloud of witnesses

1.
The father gets custody; the guard is not fired. 

2.
Two levels of amazement: at these things, and that it shocks me at all. Still young enough to be almost speechless at such amazing and everyday injustice! Well, we sigh about how jaded we are, but that's the giveaway. Because, to feel jaded? There's no such thing. It's a very precise catch-22.

Just like with feeling desensitized. I grew up
in San Francisco, and when I was little,
seeing panhandlers made me cry with empathy
and sorrow. When I was somewhat bigger, I was sad
instead about the fact that their suffering no longer
saddened me. Then I just stopped being sad.
Between caring and not-caring, there's
caring-that-you-no-longer-care. But if you're not
back-pedaling from there, you're moving forward:
we may make it to actually jaded.

3.
So don't be speechless. Finding words will matter. Listen:

At such amazing (language the flesh
dressing the bones of a common
frame of reference, and language the bones
themselves:
also young
enough to know I
can use this word because
this amazement as well will be shared,
not by everyone, but by some
of us) injustice...

Remember, there is this word amaze and this other one injustice, which tell us we could not do anything to make ourselves alone in seeing and knowing the referents. There exist these words, and we could not exist apart from everyone else who has said them (is saying them), or from the fact that we are all trusting these words, these bones, like the earth that we walk on.

4.

In your youngness

do not be cynical;
do not be lonely.

We are not the only ones talking about
injustice, fear, doubt or any of the things
that are filling your skull —

The words themselves are proof of
the passage of so many others
here.

Echoing

Bitterness: As soon as you consciously wish to forget something, it becomes almost impossible.

It's hard for me to remember physical pain once it's passed, but I can remember how it felt to be profoundly depressed, and re-collecting the original pain, holding it whole again in my hands — old, but whole — strikes an echo hurt, a meta-pain.

Melissa wrote [trigger warning for eating disorders] that this grief for the past self and for those unforgettable things is a good sign, even when it hurts deeply. Because it means that sympathy has grown where the hatred used to be.

You should read Lexi's post too, about the mean reds vs. the blues and "it's like depression has its own version of ptsd." I'm grateful for her brain.

In what sense can you leave it behind, the days of leaving scars, of wanting to be dead? And how, without forgetting, without pretending that I don't still have to watch against depression?

I want to say, Too much lost. That's part of the pain.

What lost? Some innocence, I guess. Hatred and violence and hopelessness put an end to a certain type of innocence, and those have had their place in parts of my saga with depression.

And so much to leave behind.

Theodicy. Is it the essence of evil, that suffering is meaningless?

"Humans, including women, construct meaning. That means that when something happens to us, when we have experiences, we try to find in them some reason for them, some significance that they have to us or for us. Humans find meaning in poverty and tyranny and the atrocities of history; those who have suffered most still construct meaning; and those who know nothing take their ignorance as if it were a precious, rare clay and they too construct meaning. In this way, humans assert that we have worth; what has happened to us matters; our time here on earth is not entirely filled with random events and spurious pain. On the contrary, we can understand some things if we try hard to learn empathy; we can seek freedom and honor and dignity; that we care about meaning gives us a human pride that has the fragility of a butterfly and the strength of tempered steel."
– Andrea Dworkin
  Intercourse

The evangelical in me says that that's what grace means here, that this will all mean something, and that it's not just self-illusion to think so.

I have to believe that. In an integrity of experience and purpose that will be clear in the end, with enough distance, or in those rare minutes. That there will be a story to this, to me, and that it will not be senseless.

Watchful of the shifting days

I've never had a desk in front of a window before. I do now, for the next eight weeks, and it's where I'm sitting now, looking out over the backyard. Some trees are still full-green, but the lawn has a good cover of dry fallen leaves. It makes me remember the storm that was supposed to be Hurricane Irene — my Boston friend's lawn littered afterwards as if with a sudden green autumn.

I'm back at college for my very last six credits. Anthropology of global Christianity, a German independent study on expatriate memoirs, and public speaking. It's a little lonely right now, but I'm glad to be here. Challah and microwave tea and waiting for my classes to start (tomorrow).

There is less bitter in my bittersweet this autumn. Less dread. I will be able to savor the interval that straddles late fall/early winter, a tremendously evocative time, but with the knowledge that I am free to depart to coastal California before the deep, teethy part of winter descends. It's a bit cheating, to want the moods of October and November and December without the expectation of the full length and dark of winter, without the prospect of digging in and waiting until the cold lifts of its own (grudgingly, gray-and-muddily). But the Chicago winters have taken enough from me; we can call it even.

I know it's traditionally polite and superficial to talk about the weather, but I would do it for the pleasure and interest of it. For all that modern houses and cars and supermarkets insulate us from what seasons and weather have meant to most of humanity for most of our history,  it's still impossible not to notice or be affected by them (we are still human animals). They anchor me in the present — through my senses, for better or worse/lighter or darker — even while my thoughts swim in and out of reflection and memories. And keep reminding me that time is more spiral than linear — directional, but cyclical, to paraphrase a Madeleine L'Engle character. Every autumn I am swinging back around past every other autumn I've had, close enough to reach out and graze them with my fingers.

My days lately, and Tumblr anger

The majority of my life is undocumented now. It would look like: me in front of my laptop or reading, or cooking, or baking, in suspiciously pajama-like clothes. Or me driving to class and then sitting in the back row next to the window in half-lotus, rolling my eyes ferociously and making unrelated notes. (Our rather poor excuse for a teacher tried to force me to let her see them today. Excuse ME. No, I did say, "Excuse me? No, I am not doing work for another class. I do not have any other classes.")

I think for some of us the problem with being alone too much is not being sad, but being bereft of the moderating influence of others. Ideas and impulses and moods are amplified when they are only bouncing off the inside of one's own skull. Agree/disagree?

The parts we do have pictures of:








Odessa, who lent me her disposable to take the picture below.


Burned the backs of my thighs yesterday on a "read and eat cherries in the sun" escape with her to Crissy Field. Cleared a whole bunch of books off my shelf to try to sell (oh I am broke as a joke thanks to backing out of Uganda...).

I got a rather vicious message on Tumblr, which leaves a lingering bad taste in my mouth even though I don't take it personally or even seriously. Yuck. I think I'm always willing to talk, but some people can't hear; there's no point. They hold their agenda too tightly.

I'm tired — so very tired — of witnessing the "FUCK YOU" reaction from people who've read something they don't like. I think such vitriolic reactions are not a sign that we believe deeply in our ideas, but rather that we are identifying too closely with our ideas and opinions, that we have to attack whoever threatens them rather than engaging the problematic ideas. (I have done it too, mind.) Because if the urgency were about the real issues, we would do something that was actually effective. Please, believing things deeply doesn't excuse us from our duty to treat each other well — it is so easy to hurt, and there's too much yelling already.

[Random comments always welcome; below comment space however is especially reserved for reflections/experiences with ugly online stranger-anger in case you would like to unburden some bad flavor.]

Diptych in diary entries

I woke up at seven, left around 8:30...stunning snowflakes, bitter cold. My fingers numbed on the suitcase handle, inside the gloves. Trampling perfect stars, piled delicately on the sidewalk, not packed. It was astonishing. I share that and feel that I have shared my heart. I am transparent at times; the simplest poem is a list, a window. To just see and luxuriate. I am becoming more of a sensualist every week. Only the simplest things are necessary, because they are not, at all, simple — the smell of rice. the six points of a snowflake. fingers numbing on my camera and my one knee dirty from kneeling. Amen.

[Saturday January 22nd, 2011 — 11:01p]

decisions:

*give very freely. human relations are not a conflict between mutually exclusive interests.
*purge my speech and writing of capitalist metaphors (e.g. invest, worth, value)
*reconsider abstraction — a rose is a rose is a rose; a snowflake is a snowflake, there is no such thing as a boyfriend, nothing stands for anything but rather only is, but not only which suggest impoverishment, an is is is, language and classifications to make things simpler but less beautiful and true? look, the snowfall. the sunlight. or both. nothing but. but so much.

[Saturday, June 18th, 2011 — 9:01p]