OF: The Apocalypse

What shall we do on December 21st when the 13th Baktun, and thus the world as we know it, ends according to the Mayan long calendar?

Shall we drink in anticipation?

Shall we move our families into caves?

Shall we pray?

Shall we do anything at all?

For the record, I do not think that'll happen, but I've always been completely fascinated by apocalyptic literature--particularly the Book of Revelation--ever since I was a young child. Which, in retrospect, makes complete and total sense given the kind of childhood I had.

There is an almost clinical satisfaction in destruction, particularly when it matches our inner turmoil or repressed desires or needs.

What I mean is, there seems to be a fundamental human need to watch/experience/contemplate/enact destruction. I used to think this was because human nature was inherently evil, but I see it now as part of a perpetual, unconscious push for rebirth. Spiritually. Economically. Intellectually. Environmentally.

Meanwhile: things and people die. Meanwhile: whatever was safe, or at least known to us is gone. I used to think that was bad, negative.

Apocalypse (n): from the Latin word apocalypsis meaning "revelation," and before that from Greek word apokalyptein meaning "to uncover, disclose, reveal."

Imagine: apocalypse as knowledge, as revelation, as a great uncovering of Truth. In that way there is joy in destruction, hope in destruction. For Christians, it is the hope of Christ to returning to earth. For Secularists, perhaps, it is the hope of a world free from the historical tyrannies of religion. Perhaps I sound like an idiot, but this all interests me nonetheless.

I've been a woman possessed with thinking about the end. The end of 'US'. The end of U.S. The end of bees and polar bears and the Redwood trees in California and bananas and Alaskan permafrost and ozone and Wall Street and love and debt and potable drinking water and reproductive rights and marriage and American world dominance and racial inequality and income inequality and gender inequality and pandemic diseases and poetry and poetry and poetry. All of it comes to die inside my thoughts these days.

OF: Raising Girls

A few weeks ago, in the advent of my daughter's fifth birthday, I wandered the aisles of Target trying to decide which pink plastic trinket or other to buy her when hit me like a Mack truck of college-educated, post-women's-lib, feminist guilt: should I be buying my daughter this crap?

By "crap" I mean dolls. Specifically, the princess-y type. Specifically, Disney princess-y stuff that represents, in part, the archetypal garbage I chaff against: doe-eyed, pure-hearted beauties with dead mothers and evil step-hags. Princesses which must be rescued, or married, or made wretched/humiliated/subservient to the cruel world before they can have any scrap of deserved happiness.

Somewhere a Disney marketer is saying MWUHAHAHA.

I felt sick thinking about all the stuff she already had. Things I had either purchased myself or passively allowed others to buy for her. Princess bedspreads. Princess pajamas. Princess movies. Princess books. Princess dolls. Princess puzzles. Princess panties. Princess sippy-cups. It's a pink nightmare I tell you. Where was that parent I swore I would be when Ava was in utero?

I worry about how invested my daughter is in the whole princess thing--and also weddings. Already! At age 5! She came home from school the other day and proclaimed, "Mommy, I've already chosen my husband. I married Casey at school today." Oh dear Lord. OH LORD. I responded by saying jokingly, "We discussed that you can't get married until 40, remember?" The next day, on the way to school, she mentioned something about one day leaving her family to be married and how that would change her life forever and ever. And if she chooses that, it will absolutely change her life...I just...I just don't want her to fall into the idea (consciously or more pervasively--unconsciously adhering to the idea) that being married is the end-all, be-all of a woman's life/identity/existence. I know what a fatal trap that line of thinking is; I often feel completely torn between my sometimes twee ideals of romance and love versus reality/the landscape of human relationships.

I don't have any answers. I have worry. I have (at times) poor execution of my ideals. I want to be a thoughtful, wise, and intentional parent.

I try to make it a point to talk to her about other things that are equally valuable in life: graduating from college, being independent, caring for herself and others, living a life that honors who she is and what she wants. It's not the obsession with pink or princesses that bothers me, it's the long-term baggage that is sometimes attached with the idolatry of that way of being as a woman.

God, I hope this is a phase.

God, I hope I'm doing right by her.

God, I hope Ava is one pink-tiara-wearing, ass-kicking feminist and wife (if she chooses) one day.

OF: Random Thoughts

So, I here there's a planned strike by Walmart workers slated for Black Friday. I think of my best friend's elderly grandmother living in Tennessee who is canceling Thanksgiving dinner at her house this year because she has to wake at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day to work her shift at...Walmart. She also has to do the same for Black Friday. I hate Walmart, and made a conscientious decision to stop shopping there in 2005, and I honestly do not notice any marked difference in my bottom line.

I am a working-class person, a mother who manages just fine without football stadium-sized stores chock-a-block with all that is heinous about Americana and the sad ironies of low-income, "Great Value" consumerism. We buy cheap products made in foreign countries to save money, and we become poorer as a result. Americans fail to understand (or care about?) the ramifications of a day's simple purchases, about the philosophy behind those purchases. They pretend to be powerless, unaccountable, without option, "I shop at Walmart because I have no choice!" laments the average pacifist. You have choice. You have power.

The average person has power that s/he parts with via his or her wallet. He parts with his conscience every day through his wallet. For adult-sized footie-pajamas, and flat screens, and jumbo packs of Lay's Potato Chips, and sticks of carcinogenic deodorant that smell of freesia or some exotic island delicacy. I am tired of these people who pretend they cannot choose something else because it's too damned inconvenient to live without the option of shopping for toilet paper at 3 a.m., or for a discounted laptop on Thanksgiving morning. Corporations: I am tired, so tired of Walmart, and Papa John's, and Denny's, and every other entity strong-arming the working person. Consumers: I am disgusted, so very disgusted by people lining up in the godless hours of the night to participate in our most horrid display of national avarice, Black Friday. I sincerely hope the workers of Walmart strike. Strike for all they're worth. Strike, strike, strike, and not be thwarted by corporate intimidation.

It is not anti-American or class warfare or socialist or lazy or godless to want a living wage for yourself or others. It is basic human dignity.

______



There's an essay that people on Twitter are getting incised about: "How to live Without Irony," by Christy Wampole. It's basically a critique of hipster culture, and boy are the hipsters defensive in their responses to this opinion piece! I can't help but feel a bit inclined to agree with the writer. Hipsters also "produce a distinct irritation in me," but I'd probably have to say it's because I've felt largely alienated or rejected by that whole culture. I'm never cool enough to belong with the cool kids and their various cultural appropriations which are always, excruciatingly, out of my reach for reasons beyond my control.

OF: Loneliness

"Loneliness is the greatest poverty." -Mother Theresa

"An artist is always alone--if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness." -Henry Miller

"If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry." -Anton Chekhov

"Music was invented to confirm human loneliness." -Lawrence Durrell

"Man's loneliness is but his fear of life." -Eugene O'Neill

"Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate." -Germaine Greer

"Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me, and drench me in loneliness." -Amy Lowell

OF: Hope

Just over four years ago, I was a 9th grade English teacher at Morrow High School in Morrow, GA--a school whose student body was overwhelmingly, if not entirely, composed of low-income students of color. During a vocabulary exercise, I asked students to use choose the correct word to complete a sentence which began 'When Barack Obama is President...'. My students were upset. "Don't joke like that, Ms. A," they said, "A black man will never get into the White House."

Just a few short months after that exercise, I held my infant daughter in my arms and cried joyful tears as Barack Obama put his hand on the Lincoln bible and became sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America. That night, after the inaugural balls, after the toasts--Obama and his family slept in the house that black slaves built. That fact, as well as the symbolic significance of Obama's choice of the Lincoln bible, was not lost on me. I looked at Obama, born of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan, and I saw myself. I saw my students. I saw all the generations of 'No' and 'Never' crashing down. I thought of my students--living on the literal and economic edges of Atlanta, an American city characterized by the Civil Rights--and I had hope.

After last Tuesday's re-election of President Obama--I have hope, still.

The world is changing, and I welcome it. There is power in symbolism. There is power in believing you can, that we all can.

Despite the vitriolic political discourse of our elected officials, I have hope.

Despite the coded racism of Fox News and its associated pundits (where white men lament the end of "traditional America" i.e. white, Christian hegemony), I have hope.

Despite Ann Coulter and Donald Trump, I have hope!

I have hope that fills me.

My former students--wherever you are in the world--I think of you today. I hope for you.

OF: That One Week I Sought Enlightenment

So, guess what kids? I did some new things this past week (yay for spontaneity)! And how does the universe repay my noble effort to be less hermit-like and more experimental? With vomit, that's how.

Some back story:

My best friend Ronnie is in a World Religion course that requires him to visit two non-Christian religious sites. Being the good friend that I am, of course I was happy to oblige his request to accompany him to the Shambhala Meditation Center in Decatur. Not only did I go, but I invited my Mom, brother, and his girlfriend Raven to go for the ride. So we rolled-up-deep-in-da-place on Sunday, ready to get our enlightenment on.

What we got was a lesson in how NOT to meditate. After arriving and trying our best to respectfully mimic the behavior in the room, we were tapped on the shoulder and asked to move into a separate room for a bit of private meditation training before heading over to the main meditation room. That's cool, I thought. How attentive and welcoming these hippie folk are! A stern-looking older man wearing some kind of farmer get-up instructed us in the fine art of Shambhala meditation. We were taught the proper sitting posture, breathing techniques, thought-cancellation techniques ("Imagine that you are popping each thought as it arises, as though it were a bubble"), and then he walked around correcting our sloping postures and chiding us for closing our eyes as opposed to maintaining a "low, inward-gaze."

DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW UNCOMFORTABLE, LET ALONE HOW UNNATURAL, IT IS TO MAINTAIN A LOW, INWARD GAZE? But I digress.

After a few more minutes of practice, we were herded back into the adjoining room for more meditation before heading over to the main hall for walking meditation and additional seated meditation. At this point we'd already been at it an hour. I was exhausted, and trying not to look at the rad decor, which for me was the highlight of the whole experience. At the center of the room was an altar of sorts with seven bowls of water, two purple potted Chrysanthemums, a crystal ball, two pictures of smiling monks(?)/elders(?) flanking a tapestry of an angry-looking deity with his tongue hanging out, incense, two oil candles, and gongs. Everywhere symmetry. Everywhere plumes of incense. Everywhere cross-legged Atlantans of all races seated on blue and red cushions shaped like macaroons. I wondered what circumstances brought them all here. Were they getting anything out of this practice?

All I seemed to be getting out of it was a lesson in my own erratic mind which refused to pop and dispel individual thoughts as though they were harmless rainbow-colored soap bubbles. Instead my thoughts were like Hydra in hyperdrive: cut the head off of one and three grew back in its place. All I could think of was how annoying the floor creak was, or how hideous someone's corns were during the walking meditation; the wormy, internal sound of someone's digestive tract churning; opaque cobwebs growing unchecked in the high corners of the ceiling. The smell of incense placed my mind firmly back in the basement bedroom of my high school boyfriend who played Tool songs on his electric guitar and smoked bowls of marijuana. The song "I am the Walrus" by the Beatles played on an incessant loop in my brain: "I am the eggman. They are the eggmen. I am the walrus. CucooCACHOO!"

I gave up after hour number two, when the woman in front of me broke the silence, quite literally, by cranking out a whistly fart. I could not contain the tide of my laughter. I got up. Bowed. Left.

Life lesson number 5,325: I am not the meditating kind.

The other thing I did was try Bikram yoga. Hot yoga. Yoga in a room set to 107 degrees at 40% humidity on purpose. I met up with my lovely friend and colleague, Kate, who invited me to participate. I planned my entire morning around this class. I didn't eat at least 3 hours prior, I hydrated myself...etc..etc...I was so excited, guys. I really was!

BUT. Fifty-five minutes into class, even something as basic as a warrior pose was making me die. The heat was starting to make me nutty, woozy, aware of my hulkiness as the toxicity of my decadent lifestyle came spewing from my pores, literally.

Our instructor--a cute brunette with a high, chirpy voice, and the most perfectly-sculpted yoga tush I have ever seen--decided to celebrate the autumnal equinox symbolically by having the class form a large circle, and support the weight of the person on both sides while doing a pose. "Look class: BALANCE. ISN'T IT BEAUTIFUL?!" I managed to do it once, suppressing murderous thoughts. When is this $%^&* woman going to end this class? When do I get to lay down and have a cold lavender towel for my face?

When she instructed us to do the equinox-balance-pose-thingy a second time, I sat down, breaking our lovely harmony circle--leaving the broads on either side of me in an awkward spot. I literally sat down and crossed my arms like my four year daughter does when she's miffed. Then it hit me. Waves of chunkage climbing up my throat. I covered my face with my towel, ran to the locker room, and barely made it through the door when I puked down the front of my t-shirt. Nice. Any normal human being would leave the studio immediately, right?

BUT.

There was the issue of my friend Kate, still waiting in the studio. I didn't want to be lame and not finish the class. I stripped off my shirt, mopped up the small pile of vomit that I couldn't contain, threw on a jacket that I'd stashed in my locker, and went back in. I finished the class: like a (smelly) boss. The difference between this and the meditation, is, despite one very embarrassing moment I do feel like I got something out of it. My limbs felt taut and sore for a week following; sore in that good sense of having accomplished something. My skin glowed. Jury's out on whether I'll try it again, though.

Namaste.

OF: Entitlement



Since secret video footage was released via the website/magazine Mother Jones--a lot has been said about Mitt Romney's recent comments about the 47% of supposedly non-income-tax-paying Americans who will never be convinced to take care of themselves. If you've been living under a rock: according to Mitt Romney (and by extension, those like him), 47% of Americans "Believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."

I don't pretend to think that I can (or want to) add to the already brilliant, nuanced criticisms of the presidential candidate. But I can't help but feel motivated to say something about this pernicious little word: entitlement. Entitlement. Here's what that word means to me.

Entitlement means that you believe you are qualified to run the United States of America because you successfully managed to pad your off-shore account by legally circumventing IRS tax code.

Entitlement means that you believe it's completely okay--not only okay, but a point of pride--that you only paid 14.1% in taxes on dividends earnings in 2011 as a multi-millionnaire, when the average American household (earning roughly $50,000-75,000) paid an effective income tax rate of 12.8%. Yes, I understand that the latter rate is lower. But I also understand how it is overall a much HIGHER cost when one considers the proportion of income swallowed by this sort of tax system. What did Clinton say at the DNC? Oh yes: arithmetic.

Entitlement is running one's campaign on a Christian platform and hating the poor.

Entitlement is being a Christian politician who conveniently forgets Matthew 19:21: "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me."

OR

Matthew 19:24: "And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

OR

Matthew 25:35-40: "For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.’ “Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink?‘And when did we see You a stranger, and invite You in, or naked, and clothe You? When did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?' The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me."

That Jesus guy sure does sound like a socialist. An entitlement socialist, no?

Entitlement means telling 47% of America--nearly half of the population--that it's "not [your] responsibility to worry about them" while concurrently asking for their votes, to be their ruler, to be given the highest privilege and responsibility in the nation as President.

It doesn't just stop at politics, kids. There's a lot that's upsetting me.

If I haven't pissed you off/alienated you already, I may do so now. I apologize in advance.

I have a friend who told me once that I sounded ridiculous when I went off on tangents about race/the effects of race/class/what-have-you. He told me that I was like his short-sighted relatives in thinking there were certain things that "only brown people are allowed to talk about." For the record, I don't feel that way--but I do get a bit sick of people (particularly writers, particularly liberal, college-educated writers) thinking they have somehow been liberated from the yolk of any underlying prejudice simply because they grew up in a post-Civil Rights America, in an integrated society. Simply because they have perhaps dated outside of their race or have a black friend or because they like Bob Marley or because they are well-versed in and sympathetic to diasporas of all sorts.

Entitlement is thinking it's totally okay that women, and particularly women writers of color, are drastically underrepresented in publishing today. As though it were just a matter of unfortunate happenstance, and not institutional gatekeeping. As a woman writer of color, as a female Hawaiian poet (which represents less than 1% of published writers in America) I am disheartened by the blase attitude of some of my peers in publishing about this issue. It's largely shrugged off as unimportant, or glazed over with some sort of meaningless platitude. It is the literary version of a Romney-ism.

I am no victim. I am not entitled because I desire a fair opportunity in life or in art. Any path I carve out, I carve of and from myself. That applies to politics and poetry. Frankly, they have more in common than you'd imagine. Nearly every day, in working; in paying my fair of taxes; in going about my small life, the life of a unnamed Hawaiian woman cranking out a modest existence in the American South; in sitting on the bus in between jobs; in reading this or that; in waking at dawn to write a poem, I think of the Lucille Clifton poem, "won't you celebrate with me?"

won't you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did I see except to be myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge

between starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that every day

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

Oh Hello There, Internet

Forgive me friends if I've neglected you these last months.

It’s been so long since I posted anything online that I admittedly feel a bit timid. Every time I've thought about writing anything here, I've suddenly stopped--as though the blog police will inform me that I'm violating unspoken decorum in polluting airspace in writing about my-little-ol-insignificant-self instead of something or someone which warrants actual attention and examination. 

Life right now is anxious and urgent, but perhaps it always is? Perhaps we are only cognizent of the urgency of living when things are painful or new, or when we are truly free and have reconciled our actions with the conviction that we will die sooner than we think?

Life right now is the fullness of Atlanta heat and sweaty, pregnant clouds collapsing into violent rainstorms. Life right now is discovering Philip Larkin for the first time and quietly weeping into glasses of very, very cheap red wine over gorgeous lines like, "Man hands on misery to man / It deepens like a coastal shelf."

Life right now is two jobs to equal one full(ish) income.

Life right now is coming home at night to a child who is already sweetly sleeping in her bed, and feeling strong and concurrently helpless when I drop that same child off at preschool the next morning while she whimpers and clings to my leg and begs me to stay with her instead of going back to work. Life right now is modeling the value of hardwork and sacrifice. I can only hope that one day she will forgive me, and understand why I must be apart from her so much right now. 

Life right now is fighting for life right now.

Life right now is listening to my inner-most self.

Life right now is politely (temporarily) removing myself from the poetry scene, and that feels very good and necessary. My brain and heart have appreciated the break from the preening and useless circle-jerking that seems to abound in this little tribe.

Life right now is gobbling up a lot of non-fiction, YA novels, and personal finance manuals lately and somehow that feels more nutritive and empowering than my constant poetry consumption in the last 2 years which has left me (lately, anyway) feeling disgusted or rejected or full of exquisite jealousy. I leave poetry with the hope of rediscovering the joy of it.

Life right now is quiet and solitary and uncertain, but for the first time it is taking a shape that I give it.

Surely that is worth saying something about.

OF: Quiet Space

Photo by Big Richard C, CC (c) 2006

As someone currently living in a house with six other people, I've been thinking a lot about silence lately. Namely, what it means to have quiet space--literally, and mentally--and what it means to be bombarded with so many "life-improving" technologies or human interactions on any given day that it all becomes neither life-improving nor human. 

I've been thinking about the role of library as a sort of sanctuary of the mind and whether that concept is valid any more. 

I've been thinking about throwing my beloved iPhone into a dumpster and cutting my blossoming Internet addiction off at the root. 

I've been thinking about the extent to which all of this false connection actually makes me feel more alone, more antsy, and less capable of focusing on books, art, conversation, people. 

I've been thinking about what constitutes true quiet space--the cessation of external noise, internal noise, or both? What is the value of silence in our culture? In the age of narcissism, of the tweet, do we even honor silence as a necessary thing for the mind? As a necessary aperture by which regeneration and learning enter us? Creativity and peace?

Which brings me to the story of the "Crazy Asian Chick Who Goes Mad Over Breathing @ CSUN." A few weeks ago The Huffington Post did a brief story on a YouTube video that'd gone viral of an Asian student at CSUN who went "ballistic" in the library during finals week because other students were talking on their cell phones, etc, while she was trying to study. Naturally this caused a flurry of response because the girls who filmed their fellow student's rant called attention to her race, etc...

I felt incredibly sad for the girl when I first saw the video; namely because people thought it was okay to post critiques of her actions based on stereotypes and hatred toward Asians, and also because no one invested in the conversation centered on race spoke to the burden of the pressures to succeed as felt by minority students in particular. Very few stopped to consider what it meant to succumb to rage in a moment of intense academic stress and then suffer subsequent humiliation via the worldwide web.

And watching this video again, I'm still sad. And even now I'm not sure that I shouldn't be accusing myself of exploiting this student by re-posting the video and therefore sort of victimizing her again? And isn't that the nature of news? Of the Internet? Of talking about miserable and hurtful things which become viral on a platform wholly unconcerned with the lives--let alone feelings--of those who become immortalized with these sort of cruel snapshots? A moment of irrational anger. Of lust. A tweet. A picture. Forever and ever as the metadata lives and the URL persists.

What is anyone entitled to anymore  in terms of privacy or silence or dignity when it's so simple for anyone within earshot to record via smartphone and broadcast/share/digg/tweet/stumbleupon? Where was the librarian when this whole debacle was going down during finals week at CSUN? What obligation does a library/librarian have (if any) to provide and reinforce a place of sanctuary, of silence?

I don't really have any immediate answers to these questions other than to think of the myriad ways that I need silence as a human being. As a poet. As a woman attempting to reconnect herself to herself, to her mind, on a continual basis. It's not that I think Internet or the technology is inherently evil, or damaging, I just think it perhaps demands too much oxygen, too much attention in the menagerie.