| February 2003 February 1 2003 9:22 AM I did a lot of laundry. Up and down the three flights of stairs. And then I folded it all. Well. Most of it. And cleaned the bathroom. And went to the store.
I did not do any writing.
Sigh.
Valentine's day is a construction of the greeting card industry.
So why do I always get the blues?
I have never, never had a valentine. Isn't that the saddest thing? Well. No. There are sadder things. But I've been feeling this verge of tears kind of blue about it. And shit it's two weeks away.
The other night I got into bed and I was really feeling the sadness. I kept trying to think about other things. Finally I just started to push into it. You know like when you have a tooth ache and you push the tooth with your tongue even though it's gonna hurt worse. That's what I was doing. I just felt the sadness.
And today I've had all these memories of my long history of unrequited love. And I had all these ... I dunno ... little releases. Sounds almost sexy doesn't it?
It is sad. I've known some great men. And a couple of them really loved me. But. Not THAT way.
I know too many fat women who are in great relationships to believe that it's about being fat. I think it's a combination of my bad psychology, fate, bad choices. I don't really know. And being fat is in the mix. If I'd been thin I might have had a valentine a time or two. But I'm not sure I want to think about that. I always wanted to believe in love. Things have not gone well and I gotta say .... I may have given up.
So I feel sad. And it seems like the right thing to feel. Somehow not backing away from it seems to be giving me a kind of relief.
I woke up to this news. Very sad.
The White House has cancelled Laura Bush's February 12th symposium on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman after a group of poets planned to make that date a day of "Poetry Against War." (More)
GONG HEI FATT CHOY ) ( Linked from Glovefox. Who is making some amazing food for her celebration) Yesterday I turned the radio on and Scott Simon was talking in a somethingterriblehashappened voice. I got the same feeling I had on September 11.
At first I was relieved that it wasn't about the war being escalated, or another terrorist attack. I listened to the news while I read through my blog roll and wrote my own post. Somehow it wasn't registering with me. And then I turned on CNN for the pictures.
I hate the way CNN & MSNBC play footage over and over. And this was footage of this falling stream, never hitting the ground, always falling. It reminded me of a line in a song that a friend of mine wrote years ago.
Every falling angel is like a falling star. Bursting through the darkest night Sometimes you can see them right from where you are Sometimes they just burn on out of sight
it wasn't until the NASA briefing, watching the men who knew the astronauts try to speak through their tears, that I began to cry.
I looked around the blog world and watched as the posts popped up. There was sentiment and horror. I wondered if I should write something. But I had no words.
There was some discussion on CNN about Ilan Ramon. His parents are Holocaust survivors. He had taken a drawing of a child who had perished in a camp into space with him. My heart ached. But there were connections being made that I found disturbing. There was the shared grief of two nations, which I felt, and there was the reaffirmation of how Israel and America are working together in so many ways. I found some of the way that was represented troubling. Apparently he had flown a bombing mission in Iraq and it was condemned at the time. The person speaking on CNN said something about how now that we know what we know about Iraq the world will remember the bombing differently. But why?
He served his country. In many ways. He served his family. His death is a loss. But the actions of his country and my country, good and bad, should not be forgotten.
History is written by the winners. Or so they say.
There is no sense to be made of events like this. There is sadness and loss. There may be learning.
I spent the day trying to work on writing for school. I did get some done. The day felt long and sad.
And yet. They died fully engaged in life.
Laurie directed me to the nice folks at Madarine Designs who are offering the code for these gifs. You don't know what you're going to get when you put in the code. You take a chance and hope for something beautiful.
How much longer? (link via Susan)
I made a big pot of leek, mushroom, potato soup. I am strung out on the leeks. I put a pile of it in a bowl grabbed a fork and took it to the desk.
Grabbed a fork.
For soup.
I mean there was some stuff in the soup to be eaten with a fork but it was all in broth. I mention it to exemplify how unfocussed I was all day.
Maybe it was the shaking. I thought I felt one jolt.
Somehow I got a tiny bit of writing done. OK. So one of the buttons on the left says ...
It's a guest book. If you go back to the first entries you see the people I harassed into signing. Mostly friends. I stopped begging people to sign it and ignored it all together for a while. But recently people have been signing it. People who I don't know. Some just say, "nice site." Some seem to have their own site that they want to pitch. And the last one seems to be a porn site. I didn't look but there were a lot of X's. What is that about? It kinda makes me laugh. I mean is it a new form of spam? I can delete it. But I have to say, it's just so odd that I can't seem to bring myself to take an action. Now the guest book has become this thing that I check every once in a while to see if anything too weird has been entered.
I was reading Body and Soul yesterday. She had a link to a very cool Rice for Peace campaign. Later I got e-mail from Marilyn telling me about it. I'm not sure it'll stop the war but I like the idea. It may not have worked the first time but I agree with Jeanne D'Arc, It may be wishful thinking, but sometimes that's all you got.
I sent the link about the FAA weighing people to Paul and he blogged it. I am sort of stunned by the response. Not many people seemed too alarmed. Most were, understandably, more concerned about being safe on an airplane than they were about being weighed. I understand wanting to be safe when you fly. But the implications of the FAA weighing passengers are dubious to say the least.
I first heard about it on a Donahue. He was doing a show with Atkins who was promoting his diet. Donahue opened a segment of the show by saying...
"I speak of the Charlotte airplane crash. The plane crashed right at the airport. It took off. Got itself into a stall mode. And all aboard were killed. There’s a new report out that overweight Americans could be threatening the nation’s air safety. It was triggered by investigators looking into whether inaccurate weight estimates and how much the passengers weighed might have played a role in that crash. It’s a U.S. Air Express Commuter plane in Charlotte, earlier this year."
I think it's interesting that more people on the blog aren't a little angry that the FAA and Donahue are implying that our weight causes plane crashes. I'm not a pilot. I'm sure that balancing weight is important to being able to fly a plane. But I just think the idea that they might weigh people, at the airport, before a flight is really, really wrong headed. I think there are lots of ways to solve the problems of balancing the weight on a plane.
The discussion in the comments seemed to missing the point. The desire for safety seemed to be making it difficult to see the dubiousness of the methodology of a study to determine average weight by the FAA. And it dove tailed with a discussion about why, if we are fat positive, do we mind being weighed in public.
Picture me shaking my head in dismay.
It's not about being ashamed of your fat body. It's about not being willing to be treated like baggage. It's about not being willing to put yourself in a public situation where your weight will be villianized, pathologized and ridiculed. It's about having the dignity and self respect to question the right of the FAA to measure something that you and maybe your doctor can measure.
I flew on a small plane recently. It sucked. I didn't fit into the seat. I tried, by sitting in a way that meant I was miserable to not touch the guy in the seat next to me and I was fairly successful. But it probably wasn't safe for him, or me, that I was wedged sideways into this seat. It certainly wasn't comfortable. There was a suit brought by a thin man against the airline for being uncomfortable when sitting next to a fat person. And I'm on his side. He has a right to be comfortable. And so do I.
And we have a right to be safe.
I just think the airline industry can solve these problems without making me the enemy. KPFA is broadcasting Powell making his pitch for war. It's a miserable way to start the day. There are not words for how miserable this makes me.
Being in a writing program means you talk about writing as least as much (if not more) than you write. I often find it annoying. But not always.
I always want to talk about blogs. When you do it every day, and when you read blogs every day, it's easy to lose track of how amazing it is. But it is so amazing. People putting their lives in a note. Stuffing it into the blog bottle and hurling it out to sea. And we sit on our islands waiting for the tide to wash in a new note. Clicking back again and again to see if there's a new note.
Not all blogs are about writing. And yet there is almost always a voice. Even a blog with only enough of a sentence to hold a link has a tone. Even a blog with no words at all, a photo, or a painting are, in a way, a voice. With a tone.
And doing it pulls down the hierarchy of art and expression. We are all folk. Saying, "Look what I made today."
In workshop I read the writing of my fellow students. It's the best part. There are some great writers in my program.
You know. I wanna be a good writer. And I have work to do. And I want that to be a life long pursuit. I never want to rest. But I don't want it to be about "good enough". I want it to be about the restless need to express. To show. To tell. To change the way you say something. To change the way you remember it. To stay in an never ending edit. I love the feeling of saying something in just a certain way. The rhythm of the words.
And we live in a time when we need to celebrate every voice.
Elaine linked to this story about the veiling of Guernica. I keep thinking about a line from Joni.
They're gonna aim the hoses on ya. Show them you won't expire. Last week April put up an interesting topic for We Have Brains.
I kept thinking about it. I couldn't form a response. I did have a visceral reaction but I was having trouble putting it into words. In part because there is a way in which asserting my sexual preference always feels problematic. I am a het. But. I dunno. I have so much trouble with the hetero's. I have trouble with the assumption of normalcy. I have trouble with the privileging of representation. I have trouble with the ways some hetero women fall all over themselves for men. But I do like men. I sometimes envy my lesbian friends. There are ways in which they don't need men to get feminism.
Are there areas of mutual concern for het and lesbian feminists?
Absolutely.
Today I read this Ampersand post. It brought back the WHB's question. I was stunned by the idea of PHMT (patriarchy hurts men too) as a shut down. I've never heard it. And in the example that Amp gives in the beginning of his post I feel it as a shut down that I might make. Because the focus shift was too abrupt. It would piss me off if someone tried to shift the focus of a conversation in that manner.
But.
We are all in this together.
In another example Amp calls out the idea of violence against women being a feminist issue and then asks if violence against men is as well. Yes. When think about violence against women I think about the men who commit the violence. I think about how much it sucks that men aren't given permission to feel emotion. I think about how much pain someone has to be in to resort to violence. I do not take my mind off the women who pay the price with their bodies for the way in which patriarchy shapes us. But my heart aches for both the man and the woman.
Violence against men in the example Amp gives, (ten year old boy beaten up for being too girly) is also an issue for women. It's different. But I'm not sure how useful a discussion on the difference is, especially in terms of merit. For me, the moment in which a man responds to a woman with violence is enough of an example for how men and women are both shaped by patriarchal concepts, in ways that hurt them both.
I have never felt like feminism is only about women. And maybe that's because I'm straight. I need men to get it. But, I really think we all do.
But. There are times when it's important to isolate the issues. Some things are about being a woman. Some things are about being a man. Some things are about sexual preference. And if those conversations are derailed by shifting focus ... well then ... PHMT. And I say that with my very best talk-to-the-hand attitude.
And then I feel terrible.
I always want to move toward inclusion. I think part of the reason I've been having such a hard time writing a response to WHB has to do with not wanting to draw hard lines around myself or others. But I also think there's a time an place to make the distinction. And. I love that men are asking some of the questions.
And maybe that's because I need them too. Wednesday night class might not suck. We had fun last night. The more I talk about being a teacher the more I wonder if I'm up to the task. But I love talking about it.
Heh.
Too bad I can't get paid for talking about it.
The mighty mighty Glenn Gaesser posted a comment on Big Fat Blog in which he debunks the 3000,000 deaths from obesity thing. It's actually a chunk of his book. I want to give this book to very one who ever says anything about fat and health. I was reading a post by Medpundit talking about the sloppy use of statistics to feed the fear of fat. These people are both doctors. Both recognize the health problems that are specific to fat bodies. But they don't generalize about or inflate the problems.
Joe had an extra palm pilot. And he gave it to me. I am sosososososososososo excited. I have to go play with it RIGHT NOW. I'm tellin ya. Thursdays are like pull it back together day. Which seems ridiculous. I go to therapy on Monday, class Tuesday & Wednesday and my apartment explodes behind me as I walk out the door. Or maybe the exploding happens when I walk in. All I know is there was stuff all over the place.
It wasn't that bad. I went through the piles of mail and school handouts and washed the dishes and this and that. And I was playing with the new toy. (mine is the palm V) (Thank you Joe.) And I had CNN on. Bush comes on and I swear I thought this was it.
Suddenly all the things I'm doing, all the reading and the writing and the playing with computer toys seem pointless. I just do not know what to do.
(via Wood_s Lot) I am not writing.
Jeez.
I don't know why.
Maybe after this.
I was reading around the blogs, (Instead of writing.) And I went over to Jenni's. She writes about Rep. Howard Coble saying that he supported the decision to put Japanese Americans in camps and thinks we out to do the same with Arab Americans now. Coble is the chair of the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.
Jenni is involved with organizing Pilgramages to Manzanar and Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress.
OK. I'm going to try to do some writing now. After too many hours of procrastination yesterday I went for a walk. Bought myself some purple tulips and a double latte and came back home determined to get some writing done. And I did.
On Now, Bill Moyers and Chuck Lewis from the Center for Public Integrity talked about the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. I'd say this is about as scared and horrified as I've ever been but I think I've peaked. You can go to those sites and download a PDF of the proposed act. Some of the things proposed are detailed here. If this were to get through we would not live in the same country. This takes all the post 9/11 changes in attitude and codifies them. Civil Liberties?
Gone.
Jeanne D'Arc wrote about an MSU student who was pulled out of class and taken into custody after she mailed a bag of rice to Bush.
I keep trying to find a way to .... be ... with all of this horror. I can't let it pull me under. I have to keep living my life. I can't ignore it. It's too important. But my feeling of helplessness expands daily. The things I do, the letters to public officials I write, the calls I make, all feel essential. And so small. And yet I keep looking for more small things I can do.
Ampersand kindly posted a link to my response to his writing on PHMT. This morning I got some comments from Trish Wilson. I've never been successful at linking to my comments so I'm going to pull one of them out.
I guess I'm one of those female feminists who prefers that feminism be about the
empowerment of women. I don't think the movement should get caught up on taking
on every cause under the sun affected by patriarchy. There is only so much time
in the day, and too much to do. I may be wrong, but I don't think that other
causes are asked to take on other issues, at least not in the way feminist women
are asked to take on men's issues because all are affected by patriarchy.
Yes. I'm with ya. One of things I said in my post was that I was glad that men were asking some of the questions. Props to Amp for doing lots of writing on feminism. I don't think women can do the work for men. I don't think people of color can do the work for white people. One of the reasons I write about, talk about, think about white privilege is that I feel like it's my responsibility to understand how I am complicit with racism.
Having said that, I also know that we all need each other to help keep the process real.
I've had conversations about how groups where white people talk about their racism, or men talk about their sexism, in the presence of people of color and women, are hurtful to the people of color and the women. It's too brutal to have to listen to all that crap. And I think there's some truth in that. These are uncomfortable conversations. And they should be.
But all the people who do that kind of work push the process forward. I'm not sure that men can do the work of understanding how patriarchy hurts them without SOME input from women. There are blind spots. But it is their work. And I love it when I see them doing it.
Trish has more to say in the comments and also some great links. (Hope your server lets you back in soon Trish.)
And I am feeling the enormity of IT ALL. I feel urgent and desperate and hapless.
So. I look at my purple tulips for a minute. Try to remember that there is beauty in the world. Remind myself that I have specific work to do. And try to focus on it. And I am grateful that I know (and daily meet more) so many smart, heartful, engaged people. AH HA HA! Angela has a blog!!! Yippie! Well. I guess it's a journal. Although the whole is it a blog/is it a journal thing is wasted on me. She's found a spot and she's writing her life on line. And a sweet life it is. One of her friends had a baby boy. Made me think of Laura. There'll be one child born and a world to carry on.
Monica is wondering about comments today. It's been something I've been thinking about. I get web shy. I get paralyzed with web shyness. But I also notice that there are people's blogs where I feel almost afraid to comment and people's blogs where I never feel afraid.
I read a variety of blogs. Some of which are very political. There are amazing political debates that flare up in the comment boxes. And there are writers who draw out debate. There are conversations that happen in the comments. I love that. But I walk a line with that kind of thing. I'm not going to be aggressive in someone else's comment box. I have been terse.
It's happened here. Sometimes about fat stuff. Sometimes about ideas. I love it. I check my blog all day hoping for comments. And I've gotten a few icky comments. But not many.
On some blogs there's a feeling of people stopping by to say hi in the comments. Which feels so sweet to me. Oddly enough I can feel really shy about commenting then. It's like walking into a group of folks. Some you know. Some you don't. And you have to join in. Or not. I get very shy then.
There are people who write on the web who I left comments for and they never came to my page and left me a comment. I reacted like any other seven year old. I stopped commenting to them.
Sheesh.
And I feel competitive with people who get lots of comments every day. Or people who stir up conversation in their comment boxes. And I have to remind myself that I am doing this writing because I need to express...whatever it is I'm going on about.
I read people who have no comment box. I admire that. In a way. But then sometimes I wonder ... how do they know I was here? How do they know that think they're smart and funny and cool? I need to be able to write something. And e-mail feels like crossing a line of intimacy. Which is cool. And even more challenging to my shyness.
It's crazy. How shy can I be when I write my life in public?! Very shy. I don't always feel part of things.
Sometimes my friends ( the ones with no blogs) leave me comments. I love that. And I have met people in my comment boxes. I met Angela in my comment box. And now she has A BLOG!!! AH HA HA HA!! I'm going to go and leave her a comment. I'm SLEEPY. I don't know why. I slept really well except I woke up having a weird dream in which I couldn't get to class. I went back to sleep for a while and I had the hardest time waking up. This is really unusual. I feel like I might hafta go back to sleep.
I went swimming yesterday. Ate some pasta with Deb and Ari. Shopped. Talked on the phone. I felt pretty great at the end of the day. And I feel OK today except I'm so sleepy.
I need to finish this piece of writing that I'm handing in tomorrow and another that I'm presenting on Wednesday. So more sleeping is not a good idea. I've been sitting here reading blogs and drinking tea and eating cereal. I'm sposed ta be awake now. Sleeping during the day in my apartment is not really possible. There's a middle school across the street with a come-to-class buzzer and screaming, laughing, shouting kids. There's some construction going on involving what sounds like driving large metal poles into the ground. There' s traffic noise. At night it can get so quiet that I can hear the seals down at Fisherman's Wharf. So I got back in bed yesterday. But it was clear that I wasn't going to get any sleep. I shook off the sleepyness and got the writing done. It put me in a great mood
I had to go to group last night. The #14 Mission bus was having issues. Not an unusual situation. I left my house a little after five and got to group at ten to seven. Late. I'm never late. But it was OK. I was in a great mood.
Beth said something so perfect last night. She was talking about when people are focussed on the love (or more specifically the lack of love) of one person. She wonders what's being ignored. What I took from that was that I can focus on the love I don't have or I can focus on the love I do. Seems obvious enough and I think I'd already figured that out. In fact I think I was already doing that. But I just loved the way she said it.
So many people I know are going though stuff with their partners or love interests right now. And every where you look there's the hopped up Valentines day consumer driven notion of romantic love. It's toxic.
If you love someone you'll buy them lots of stuff.
Well. I guess I could feel grateful that I don't have to deal with all that. And I guess I do. But I also have the sadness.
But there are plenty of things focus on. New York City is trying to keep the march from happening.
Yesterday I had CNN on and Ashcroft was answering press questions and someone asked him about the ramp up of the Patriot Act and the idiot CNN news (cough) person talked over his answer. It was like they couldn't get the camera off fast enough.
Things are going to get pretty crazy.
And all this work I've been doing on how to keep my heart open, despite the huge chunks that have been bitten out of it, seems to be helping me with handling the misery of what's happening in my country.
If you love someone say no to war. I went to school early. There's a reading room at Lone Mountain. Green leather chairs along long tables. Rows of lamps run down the middle of each table. There's almost never anyone in there. It feels monastic. The reading that I had to do for class was dense and analytical and easier to do in that setting than in my apartment with so many other things to tempt me.
We had to read Patrimony for workshop. I was able to read that on the bus. I'm ambivalent about the book. It's about the last year or so of Philip Roth's father's life. It did bring back memories of December with M & K. That feeling of being a child, now caring for a parent.
As I am writing this I am listening to KPFA. They are listing all the demos that will be happening this weekend. I mean there's one big demo but people are meeting in different coalitions.
And it's raining.
I have to work on my presentation for class.
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