“debauchery box” – a poem

a man looked for his definition in a corporate directory

and he saw a picture of adolf eichmann

and wondered what it meant

so he went to his boss and he said

i think there is a problem

i think everyday

i think you should help me fix this

and his boss went to the supervisor

and his supervisor pressed the red button

and the c.e.o. called the man to his office the next day

and they sat over steamed milk and espresso

the c.e.o. told him he had three weeks’ paid vacation

he put a sombrero on the man’s head because

he needed time to himself

so the man went on a company retreat one week

and he walked around in the glass penalty box

where his happiest hour is mixed with spirits and juices

and his nature walk doesn’t involve talking to birds

his paths have been chosen for him

and if he chose not to explore nature on the carefully prepared

pebble walks through streams designed to keep you dry

he could approach the people on the corners

for quick fixes and lays

mergers and acquisitions

as long as he stayed in the glass penalty box

for thinking once and thinking everyday

well the man tried his best

but he was still thinking until one day

he wandered away from too many sharp corners

sunk his feet into too many deep puddles

and got embarrassingly lost in thought

nearly drowned in thought at one point

he wanted to die in thought and not sensation

his suits were too expensive for a funeral

so the corporation had to activate his GPS

because he was on the margins of the box

where they had no welcome reception

and they tried again to drown him in sensation

they sent electric currents to the man

but he only felt stimulated

they sent dogs with sharp teeth and drooling tongues

but the man learned they gave sloppy kisses

and they rolled around in their underwear

and chased sticks

and licked rocks

the corporation got angry because it could only react

not wonder like the man

so they finally sent a lady dressed in ivy

with poison in her thoughts

and she sat next to the man and licked his tongue

and asked him what it meant

and he penetrated her thoughts before she sank him

back into sensation and feeling

and he realized what it meant and felt afraid

because a week was a long time to feel lost

a week was a long time to think and get wet

a week was a day for more work and more money

so he returned to work two weeks’ early

and he got back into it

and more people died but the numbers aren’t in yet

he’s mindlessly tapping but the numbers aren’t in yet
they may still be trapped in tomorrow’s returns

A love letter.

Dear M,

I write this letter out of love. If I saw someone I loved struggling with something, failing to understand their surroundings, trying to get out at every turn, I’d reach a hand out to help without a second thought. But sometimes, because it’s you suffering, I hesitate. I justify the struggle as something deserved for what you’ve done, or I place the blame on you for something that only happened to you.

But now I’m realizing that’s not fair to you. You deserve everything you dream of getting. You should have happiness, you should have opportunities, and you should find work that teaches you and fulfills your zeal to move forward and help others. I’m trying not to be hard on you because you are going through more than you want to admit. You need way more help than you want to admit, and you are afraid to stare your pain in the face and confront it. I recognize that quality as human in everyone else, and now I see it in you. And that’s okay.

You feel as if there is a lot missing in your life. Go find what it is. Seek and ye shall find; ask and ye shall receive. Simple principles are hard to master, but once you’ve got it, you keep it with you for life. We make a good team because we understand each other. Even if we don’t want to understand each other at that particular moment, you and I are a good team. That’s why I love you and I’m talking to you like this.

You’re always preoccupied with figuring out ways to share your talents without coming off flashy or self-important. You know theoretically about making mistakes to learn something new… yet you always beat yourself up the second you trip. You feel as though your instincts – even though they are right 99% of the time – take you down the difficult path. But when you reach the path you thought would be easier, you show up to the door of opportunities with more bruises on your expectations than you wanted. You go through so many processes and changes and hide away as much as possible. You think the wheels that spin in your head in all directions can be seen, and you feel transparent and naked and scared.

Well, I still love you, and I’m writing you to let you know that you’re normal. You are your own normal. Accept your default, please, or no one else will. Look at the conflicts you’ve encountered in your life, and you’ll find that you’ve given in to some of the most ridiculous demands to change who you are. And what is the result? You’ve only learned that at the slightest pressure, you can transform yourself into a person you don’t recognize or admire. There have been painful moments after fights where you’ve sat crying and shuddering because of all the negative energy you’ve expelled, in response to all the negativity you’ve absorbed. But once your body calms down, and you’re breathing normally again, you feel a serene sense of comfort. You feel calm and you feel vindicated because you didn’t give in. Hold fast to that comfort; you’ll need it to survive.

It’s time to channel the fighting spirit that you’ve been nursing inside of you towards helping others. You’re dabbling now, and that’s great; you’re gently making your way outside of your shell. But you weren’t blessed with all these opportunities to dabble and to creep around. God has given you so many things for so many diverse reasons. You know He’s the reason you have them. It’s time to give back, as is expected of you, and to act like you know you owe a debt to something beyond credit bureaus and loan agencies.

I love you. Get used to it. People will not love you, let alone like you. Get used to it. There is a lot of abuse and pain and madness in the world. Never get used to that. Those controls, those causes, those spirits seeking to hurt people – you work to stop them. I love you because I know you know that this is why you fight. This is why sometimes you try to eat your anger; but sometimes the anger is deserved. Know when to hold it and when to fold it, when to walk and when to run. God will help you decide when; listen.

With the deepest love I can generate I send you this letter. I know you’re reading it and you feel something good, something real, and something new. Embrace it. Embrace yourself.

Love.

Practicing What I Preach: Taking Care of Self in a World That Ain’t Gonna

My refrain for the past few weeks has been “I’m tired.” Sometimes I don’t make it that far, to pretty enunciation and solid declaration. It’s “I ti-ud” or “I’s tyyyed!” Words start at a breakneck pace and then they slow to a death crawl across my mind, wondering if they’ll ever hit a page before my lids seal shut. The words gossip among themselves, wondering if any of their ancestors ever hit a page or a writing space. Then “I’m tired” — the Godzilla phrase of Word Town — chomps down on each syllable and purees the gibberish into my dreams.

It’s hard lately for me to read the news. The articles and alerts devastate me. Sometimes there is an event that calls for Rapid Action Now and I am too busy watching Tiredzilla chomp up all my opinions on what’s happening, until Tiredzilla becomes a huge gelatinous blob of disinterestedness. Tiredzilla and I have rediscovered the soma that is television. We like watching whole seasons at a time and making snarky comments at the characters. Tiredzilla and I wish Heroes weren’t so bad nowadays, for example.

Sometimes my sisters try to trick me into writing by being their clairvoyant, funny, and creatively erotic selves. They catch me in fits of conversational pique, and say, “You should write that! You should blog that!” And I declare in that moment that I will. I will! The trumpets blast; the drums roll… and then I get tired again. Because there aren’t many different words I know. I should read the dictionary, maybe pit Tiredzilla against Thesaurus for some epic dinosaur battles. Hmm… but Thesaurus is made of words. Tiredzilla wins. Hi Sylar.

I think I wrote to feel as if my thoughts had meaning. And they do; I know they do. But I initially started writing for validation outside of the law school environment. I rebelled against the institution trying to rewire my brain; I don’t think linearly. I don’t proceed in straight lines. Everything about me curves and contours — my body, my voice, my spirit, my energy. The lines and branches sapped my strength. But now that I’m out of law school, finished the bar exam, and can practice law — I feel like I slept through something important. Some life-changing moment that would define where to go from here got buried in blog posts and now it’s being consumed by an overbearing dinosaur word-eating beast named Tiredzilla. With the new year happening all around me, every second and keystroke and breath disappearing into the past, I realized I had to step into the future consciously. The past would not leave me if I stopped fixating on it.

So I started with confession. I created a private space and I started confessing truths to myself, crying as the sheets of denial fell away and I was facing a very naked and tired me. I still have a lot of confessing to do, and I know myself well enough to confess and to contemplate in moderation. But once I started pointing out to myself where I felt strongest, what actions made me feel weakest, what great and painful events shaped the better part of me — well, it made Tiredzilla want to ease up on some of those words trapped in its jaws.

Then I decided I wanted to move my body more. Tiredzilla likes beds of vocabulary and syntax; the dinosaur is slothful. Surrounding itself with its food and wrappers of justification for being so out of it and fragile — I didn’t like that. My habits and Tiredzilla’s habits began to merge until I was one sleepy woman full of half-chewed thoughts and epiphanies, bordering on being less of a philosopher and poet and more of a raving conspiracy theorist. So I pushed myself out of the reclining position and looked around for ways to exercise. I reassured myself: it takes three weeks to form a habit. I’m on the early part of week two, where I’ve been drinking 8 glasses of water a day, exercising three times a week, and keeping track of what I eat and how it makes me feel. (Today, I think a new salad made me sick. Whee.) I lost my mind with happiness when I lost one pound after the first week — can you imagine? How crazy would Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers commercials be if Kirstie Alley or Queen Latifah stood there extolling the loss of a single pound?

But since my goal was one pound a week, I felt ecstatic. I’m still moving on that little high, and I want to remember it so that if I hit a week where I feel upset or disappointed with the world, I can remember there’s something inside of me that is capable of working just fine and doing something wonderful.

During calorie counting, I lost my mind over a McDonald’s meal I ate. 1000+ calories for a burger, some fries, and a soda?! It was literally as if I’d never heard of Supersize Me or any of those news magazine stories that clutter my daily life. I then went to tell everyone I knew about my newfound fast food trauma, and they stared at me as if the burger made me grow three heads. “They’ve been saying that forever; where have you been?” I don’t know where I was before; but now I feel how disgusting that is. It’s like the double cheeseburger hooked onto a nerve ending and pinched the living daylights out of me. I got bullheaded. There has to be better ways to live.

My next step is to start reading again. I wish my book list weren’t so heavy; however, I need to revive my critical thinking chops with some fresh meat. Tiredzilla won’t appreciate the deluge of heavy concepts; it’s the equivalent of being overtaken by a gaggle of F16s. But my exhaustion can’t run the show forever. I’m taking a long period to learn how to rest, to study the movements of my hips and the rise and fall of my chest as I breathe, to laugh at silly things and smile at small children. It’s as important as the Rapid Action Now moments to my existence, and yet… not quite so draining and saddening.

I want to return to Rapid Action Now with a mind, body, and spirit capable of Rapid Action. So now I understand all that stuff I told people about allowing themselves to be. And it does feel good. Wow.

I’m learning not to speak unless I really genuinely have something to say. And I guess what I wanted to really genuinely say here is I love myself so that I can love you. Fully and deeply.

sans accoutrements, s’il vous plait

So on Tumblr, someone posted an abstract of a book titled Conspicuous Compassion:

We live in an age of conspicuous compassion. We sport empathy ribbons, send flowers to recently deceased celebrities, weep in public over murdered children, apologize for historical misdemeanors, wear red noses for the starving, go on demonstrations to proclaim ‘Drop the Debt’ or ‘Not in My Name.’ We feel each other’s pain. We desperately seek a common identity and new social bonds to replace those that have withered in the post-war era – the family, the church, the nation and neighborhood. Mourning sickness is a religion for the lonely crowd that no longer subscribes to orthodox churches. Its flowers and teddies are its rites, its collective minutes’ silences its liturgy and mass. This book’s thesis is that such displays of empathy do not change the world for the better: they do not help the poor, diseased, dispossessed or bereaved. Our culture of ostentatious caring is about projecting your ego, and informing others what a deeply caring individual you are. It is about feeling good, not doing good, and illustrates not how altruistic we have become, but how selfish. And, as Patrick West shows in this witty but incisive monograph, sometimes it can be cruel.

My first instinct after reading was yes, let’s have this conversation. Let’s do this. There have been some great and incisive writings about this point from Mai’a, Blackamazon and Sarah.

I am a thinker. I’ve never made a secret of my thoughts unless I felt it necessary. But that’s my main contribution to the world: I think. And when I feel it prudent, I think out loud. I synthesize. That’s what I enjoy.

But the question isn’t what I enjoy; it’s what I do with the thoughts and the synthesis for those around me. There’s a difference between telling people I am thinking and letting people have the benefit of my thoughts — giving them something tangible to manipulate, process, and exchange with me. If I deny that to anyone, I am not what I represent myself to be.

Too many movements hand out stickers, set up t-shirts and ribbons, prepare kitschy bumper stickers and pithy rhymes for a cause, and convince us that taking a few minutes out of our days or scraping the extra change out of our pockets can help change the world. But these organizations are not doing much to make us aware how fucked up it is that if we spent an hour, a few days, or even some months actually thinking of our actions and putting them to work for others, we could probably pull ourselves and our world out of a lot of fucked up situations.

How much would you risk to help another person? If your only claim to standing for something is wearing a costume, then congratulations: you’re a person in a costume! In our hyper-individualist society, we’re told that if it’s not about us personally, we should not have to care. If we potentially endanger ourselves helping another person, we’ve already given too much. If we try to help and wind up hurting people by accident, then society tells us it’s more prudent that we never act at all. But what is activism without risk of breaking something, of looking foolish, of getting something a lot worse before making it a lot better? Since when is changing your clothes or creative phraseology the equivalent of confronting jail, confronting death, confronting social isolation in the spirit of something you believe in?

The question is not if you had five minutes/red clothes/a new energy or space saver/more places to put your plastic/100% recycled paper goods, would you use it to save the world?

The question is if you had to act without the accoutrements, would you act or turn away? Would you make the workings of the world your business to mind constantly and actively?

And while it’s easy to say “yes” to that question, the difficulty lies in the doing.

No, it’s the stereotypes.

I’ve been trying to write a review of The Princess and the Frog for the past couple of weeks. Each version becomes more stilted, more labored by Overarching Disney Analysis and my attempt to create a Disney magic grading rubric. Draft after draft was disposed, and my ambition to write something that could make me some money if it sounded semi-coherent just went out of the window. Forget what you heard: I cannot write for money without running my brain through a sausage-maker a bunch of times. And that’s too painful.

Blackamazon finished her review on The Princess and the Frog, and I drank it in after a harrowing viewing last night of the 3D disaster Avatar. And while I agree with her that Disney lost a fatal amount of the magic and the enchantment it needed in telling Tiana’s story, I don’t agree that it wasn’t a simple problem of stereotyping.

There are many ways stereotyping can hinder a narrative and people in media; I’m going to focus on two.

The first type of stereotyping is when you have a narrative with characters two-dimensionally locked into a finite space and time of performance rituals depicting other people’s projections on their lives. KFC’s Australian commercial, for example, shows this two-dimensionality. West Indian cricket fans are not excited fans; they are a dancing, raucous nuisance around a white Australian cricket fan in a bitter sports rivalry. So what does the white guy do to make things feel less “awkward”? He gives the other fans fried chicken and declares the solution “too easy.” We know how brown-skinned people love fried chicken, anyway. Let’s make it a cross-cultural reinforcement. In this stereotypical portrayal, a sternly-worded letter to knock it off would go a pretty long way. West Indian people aren’t people; they are a narrative device. Create a new commercial where they have more agency and more of an identity beyond receptiveness to chicken, and there may be hope.

The second form of stereotyping is when you give characters agency, you give them dimensionality, and you give them promise. But you create a world for them that is so stifling and resistant to that expression that their choices become caricatures of three-dimensionality. A shared critique of this movie I’ve seen is people expected more than what they received. As Cee-Lo put it, why is this my life/is almost everybody’s question.

Disney, when choosing magic or politics as a priority for its film, chose politics. Politics, unlike magic, leaves little room for dreaming beyond the bounds of your life. You’re stuck with dreaming beyond the bounds of your position in life. Politics binds people in reality even as they crave surreality.

Disney placed its first black princess in a series of boxes and shuffled her among the boxes and called it magic. Tiana was a black woman with a dream of fulfilling her father’s dream, in a community with clearly defined places in society for people like her to occupy, with her preserving a loyalty to this world she occupied because she knew no other world that gave her enough love and wonder. When Disney tried to match the dream in Tiana’s head with a gospel-inspired, supernatural call to “find out who she is” even while she occupied a frog’s body, Tiana defaulted to deciding to work even harder to show people her brand of political magic when she returned to humanity. I viewed that portion of the movie as Disney’s way of saying that trying to elevate Tiana to its idea of magic and wonder would be a waste of time because the black audience would pick it apart and say to do better. Disney only let Tiana return to the human world — her world — after completely killing her dream of independently creating her own fairytales.

But seriously, as black women, what else can we do? We are agents of our desires, whether we like to admit it or not. When we want wonder and magic, we pour it into work or dance or family or song or church or store coffers or beauty shops. We pour our desire for magic into our surroundings, with the expectation whatever we receive can be gold-washed into proving ourselves right about having a full-bodied place in a world that enjoys making our existences as thin and flat and simplistic as lines on a sheet of paper.

Disney spent the whole movie telling Tiana that her world is not good enough for her or for a Disney-bred audience. Tiana would have to seek a solution with a prince so she could be a princess, even if that prince could promise her nothing beyond his identity as a prince. Tiana would have to understand that the magic of Disney’s world goes beyond the magic of her mind. Its story confronted her instead of enticed her; it fully imprisoned her instead of letting her escape for a while to see if she’d go back. Disney’s political magic was you take what we give you or you take nothing at all. She took what they gave even though it completely transformed her wishes, and Disney gave her back her world back plus what she thought she lost forever in the political realm.

And well, that’s just not fair to black women. We have enough portrayals about how we can’t relax, how we let our dreams get in the way of relationships, how we should settle for whatever we’re given wherever we happen to be. Did Disney really need to add to that list? Disney didn’t spend time stereotyping black women. It spent its time stereotyping the worlds black women occupy so we had no way out but through.

We saw Tiana’s foil in Charlotte, a white woman who drank fairy tales like water and surrounded herself with a collage of myths and fanciful stories in a world where everything else was simply given to her. But the one thing she was not was a bona fide princess, and she’d kiss one million frogs if she could achieve royalty. She, unlike Tiana, realized that marrying a prince signified a promotion in political and fairy tale world. And with that awareness, Disney decided to let Charlotte try to be Tiana and Prince Naveen’s benefactor. Fortunately, Disney did not let that come to fruition; that kind of twist would be a politically-charged tragedy. But significantly, it also did not allow Charlotte to be transformed into a frog along with Tiana and Prince Naveen.

So to conclude, the problem with the movie was not the absence of magic. Disney put its magic to whisking away overt racism and the stereotypes of being mystical and soulful in the capital of mysticism and soul: 1920’s New Orleans. The problem was that Disney refused to center a black woman’s magic and spirit in a story crafted specifically for her and in a place that would permit that magic to thrive. Disney slapped us down and told us to remember the impossibility of black princesses in the first place, so we’d appreciate it when they figured out a way magically to make the enterprise work politically. We were robbed, y’all. We were robbed.

Make Cake. Have Cake. Eat Cake.

There. I’ve just taught you the whole of Women’s Studies in six words.

The first step is making cake: making a living. Making money. Pointing out all of the hard work of the pink collar industry that is deliberately underpaid. Lamenting the difficulties of leaving the home and family to hit the streets and provide for that same family. Cursing the fact that in order to realize potential, the sacrifices pile up until they appear to outweigh the benefits because you’re pushing a boulder uphill by yourself in sexy 4-inch heels and an apron. You fight for ingredients and you want the right to use those ingredients to make your cake without someone cutting the gas line on your oven or stealing your sugar or forcing you to choose between making a cake or pancakes for your family.

Then you have to have cake: you don’t want to make cake you can’t keep. The world reaps the benefits of your work and there is no time for you to rest on your laurels or anyone else’s. Being taken care of when you’re old has become a liability. Being taken care of when you’re young has become passé. Being taken care of because you’ve traded something of yourself is portrayed as high treason because what you can do still isn’t viewed as an action with earning power. All you do is an investment in someone else’s future, and when that person fails, all the blame comes back to you. You cannot keep your cake if it is a good cake; you cannot keep your cake if it is a bad cake. You make cakes and you put them on display, and no matter what people think of what you produced, the product is no longer yours to control. So you want to keep whatever cake you make, regardless of what it is worth to others, because it is yours.

Lastly, you want to eat cake. You want to enjoy what you do and not be ashamed of enjoying it. You want to walk down the street looking sexy and beautiful without someone raping you. You want to walk into a room with something you’ve completed without hearing people wonder who held your hand through the process. You want to bargain and buy and sell, and you want to take all the proceeds home. You want a dollar on the dollar. You want your kids and you want to decide when you don’t want your kids. You want to speak for yourself and not as an afterthought of men realizing you’re not really in the conversation they’ve had for a few seconds, a few minutes, a few years. You want to eat your cake. You want to swallow whatever consequences you’ve doled out into the world, to enjoy your spoils and your splendors, and you want to take your good old time. You want to enjoy the beauty and wonder of you without reprieve and setbacks.

Make Cake. Have Cake. Eat Cake. The trinity of capital-F Feminism. Frightening in its naive scope, especially when you realize how dull each prong of the trident truly is.

There is no such thing as an idle cake, unless you are used to seeing a finished, dressed-up, multitiered cake divorced of its processes and commitments.

A cake does not start with the ingredients you buy at the market. There were women, like those of my family way back when, who had to pick the eggs from the chickens and milk the cows and mill flour and harvest sugar and tend vanilla fields. Making cake took them considerably longer and they often never saw the pretty pastry on the table. Never mind the problem of obtaining the land and the animals those ingredients need to survive. But it’s not about the environment or the laborers bringing the ingredients to the shop so you can buy the ingredients for the cake. It’s about cake. Cake has its own layers; it doesn’t need more.

Then when you have the cake, you need it to be presentable. You could carry your own cake; but why would you do that when other people can bring it in for you? You can show it off. You can ask another woman to bring in your cake. Another woman who doesn’t have the time to make her own cakes for her friends to see because she’s busy carrying yours. A woman who ran from her horrible life to cross borders and brave bigots and withstand abuse, just so she could carry your cake on a pretty stand made by her relatives back home for pennies and never have a piece. But at least you don’t have to carry the cake; you can just have it there because you did coordinate the shopping and find a recipe adapted from the backs of other recipes. Your cake, sort of.

Now, eating the cake. Cakes are finite. There are only so many pieces you can cut of a cake, and not everyone will get a piece. So you think first come first serve will be fair. Fine. You hop onto your turbo bike to get to the dining room table first, passing women with babies on their backs walking on calloused feet. You drive past large looming buildings with women with fast tongues and quick wits who are hungry and exhausted but can’t leave because her male co-workers have no obligations and can get cake delivered to the office whenever they need it and they’ve never really given a damn where it comes from. You drive past little girls who play on fake plastic ovens and make dry mini cakes. You watch them deny pieces to other little girls who don’t do as they say, and laugh at their arbitrary decision making. You run down a few women who plan to do the Looney Tunes trick: cut a slice of the cake and take the remaining large chunk for self. But you can’t run down all of them. You see the idea lingering in too many eyes, and by the time you reach the cake to take your bite, there’s only a crumb left.

You touch it to your tongue. It’s unsatisfying and empty, and you’ve wasted your entire day, your entire life, and the lives of your mothers chasing it.

Yet you know that if that cake were whole again, you’d drive for it again if you could, and you’d go a little faster and work a little harder. But you’re uncertain if you’d change anything about how that cake happened to be there. You’re uncertain about what would happen if you were eating that cake off the dirt. You’re uncertain if you could understand a world without a cake sitting there waiting for you.

Hm.

Wonder if Feminism is ready for a diet change. Welcome to Women’s Studies. Pay no attention to the dusty recipes, the worn-out appliances or moldy ingredients, my friends. You’re here to speak to the world about a cake…

So everyone knows who I am…

This is who I am. This is me.

I am thoroughly and completely afraid. I feel too weak to keep wearing the masks. All the masks are fragile and tear-stained. None of the masks reveals who I am.

So this is me.

I’m frightened. I feel incapable of doing anything. I feel as if I am constantly walking near black holes, and I don’t realize I’ve walked near them until the next time I see daylight. And when I see the light, I realize I had been moving through darkness for a long time.

This is who I am.

I can’t sit in front of people and honestly say that sitting in that chair, in that room, in an uncomfortable suit, with two sheets of paper meant to encompass my entire life’s worth and contributions, waiting for a question that is answerable about my experiences, and hoping that my entire existence is passable for a job that will take all my time and yet barely cover all of my bills is where I expected to be in five years. I can’t say that was the path I envisioned that would lead me to the work of my dreams. And yet here I am.

This is me, and I am all I have left.

I don’t know who the Joneses are, and I don’t know what they have. I only wish that I didn’t pretend I knew when I completely ruined my credit chasing after specters of fulfillment. I wish I didn’t sit regretting every gift I sent people, every decadent meal I ate, every allowance I made so I could have safe transportation to and from school, and every time I capitulated to a completely arbitrary need. My space is full of absentminded “needs” that were rudimentary ethereal “wants” once upon a time. And now, when what I really need is quickly becoming elusive, simply “wanting” it instead is still not enough. I can’t swipe a card and get stability. I can’t write a check and feel healthy. I can’t eat my worries and call it survival.

This is me, and I am laid bare.

I am a writer, right? I like writing. I like words. I love reading. I have a sense of syntactical order. I can put together coherent sentences. I synthesize complex concepts while skimming cereal boxes. I try to fill my head with important topics. I want to be a woman of the world and not a woman of the dirt on which I’m crawling to ask for something. Everything. Food. A grant. A job, an extension, a scholarship, a lead, an invitation, something that makes me feel like these words built up inside me matter. I want to bring my words to the altar and feel as if they’re good enough for sacrifice. I wouldn’t lay a hand to my brother over them; but I would nurture resentment if I couldn’t make some living from the gift I’ve had since conception. First thought, first read, first recognition of the thousand words interconnected in a picture. I’m fearing the vacancy behind my stares. I wonder what happened to the natural inflection in my voice and when I started to resent the world that has borne me for nearly 24 years.

I’m learning slowly that age only works as a measure of years and not of perspective. Every setback sends me to an old time, reminds me of every skinned knee on the gravel-topped playground. I remember I would either stand up and keep running, or I’d see the blood welling up and start crying. The scrapes hurt the longer I stared at the pain. But I still looked for them, watched them sting and swell until they formed fading marks on my body.

Perhaps I’m a bad writer. This isn’t relatable. This is me, and this is how I talk myself out of staring at my own pain. This is who I am when I’m watching my reality sting and swell around me, except I worry I’ll suffocate as it starts to heal.

I’ve never wanted to be a woman. I resented a lot of my friends and peers who were in such a hurry to be adults, to be grown. Everyone wanted to get grown and I loved the moments of just being me. I didn’t change; time changed. I did things to accommodate time; but I felt unchanged and unsympathetic to this idea of running away from my girlhood. But now time and grownness are slapping me in the face. I now understand why so many of my friends find and create worlds of imagination in the slivers of time allowed them. They are grown, and I am lucky because they are waiting for me to join them. They are there to help me, and I love them fiercely.

I no longer feel proud of my wants because now I need to be grown. I need to join that clan of adulthood and responsibility or I’ll be eaten half-alive. But this anachronistic circumstance stares back at me in the mirror. When I am crying and I am scared, I look the same way I did when I was 3, 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 18… My body grows to accommodate new worries and demands of time. But when I dream, I watch movies of other people’s lives, just like I did as a kid. Not my own. I don’t belong in there, not me. When I tried to place myself in a dream, I developed panic attacks that kept me from sleeping. I endured sleepless nights until I returned to the default of movies and dramas and costumes and firelight.

But now this is who I am. This is me. And I have to place myself firmly into a dream. And I am terrified. Me. Just… shaken with this realization that I can’t say when I grow up anymore because the world doesn’t have time to wait for me to grow. It doesn’t care about the growth of people like me. It just wants its time on its schedule and in its way.

I have to resolve to give it time on its schedule and in its way. Every exhalation feels like a quit. Not a release, just a quit. A rhythmic resignation to a demand to grow. Realizing that even though I was never meant to survive, the point is I did. I do. I survive.

Now I have to thrive. This is who I am.

This is me.

“Lady” | Regina Spektor

A Sunday morning tribute song to Billie Holliday is a great way to begin and to end your week.

Two Questions for the “About Our Children” Telecast

Tonight on MSNBC from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., they are telecasting a panel called “About Our Children.” The panel will discuss “poverty in America, focusing on the parenting, education and health issues facing the poor in the United States.

If that didn’t make you cringe, here are the panelists:

[Dr. Bill] Cosby, along with panelists including Ben Jealous, President of the NAACP, Terrie Williams, author of “Black Pain” and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers

Some nights I thank Jesus I do not have cable; this night is one of those nights. I don’t know what to expect exactly; but I DO know that Dr. Cosby has a track record of making points by ridiculing poor African-Americans — or should I say, ridiculing stereotypes of them. Us. I’ve been poor all my life despite my current academic pedigree, and I still am.

I do like Ben Jealous, though, after reading about his plans for the NAACP and seeing evidence of those plans taking shape. Now after my incident with Julian Bond (where he gave me the meanest look after liveblogging his visit to UB… in the front row), as well as many other situations I don’t care to dig up and recount, I thought I should keep my mouth shut about any skepticism about anything controversial until I find a job. My blog is now linked to my name after suggesting a fundraising campaign for The Nation, and it’s forced me to rethink the ways I present myself and how they’re read professionally.

But in the end, I can’t help what I think. Even if the thoughts are dead wrong, controversial, or meandering, they’re my thoughts. And if I can’t advocate for what I think and believe, what good would I be entering the legal field advocating for others on any meaningful level?

Now I’m a fan of Mad Men, despite criticisms that it doesn’t do enough for identifying racial animus and people of color’s perspectives in the sixties. (I think the silence speaks volumes; but that’s another post.) There’s a scene in one of the episodes in which Don Draper instructs two developers of the soon-to-come Madison Square Garden project that if they don’t like what’s being said, they need to change the conversation. So, taking that advice and adapting it to my own ends, I decided to send in two questions to the panel and throw caution to the wind. Both issues bother me and I hope that the panelists will address them without any of my suggestions being involved. If they’re not, so be it. I tried.

Question #1:

If you want to understand why so many people of all ages turn to the streets after a history of committing crimes, it’s due to the fact the streets are the only places that meet them where they are and get money in their pockets. When will people in higher echelons of society turn their attentions to prisoner health care and effective reintegration? The prison system is where opportunities to change lives are lost. Our current system of incarceration does very little to rehabilitate socially the people it captures. The prison population has high rates of disease and poor health care. The non-profit organizations that are dedicated to helping prisoners have to fight an uphill battle against the stigma of being in jail. This society has little respect for the idea of prison sufficiently paying a debt for crimes committed against it. And the private prison owners profit from the ineffectiveness of reintegration and the absence of true rehabilitative efforts.

How do we set up a system in which the streets aren’t the only options for people leaving prison doors and in which they can receive proper care after serving their sentences?

Question #2:

When I was growing up, going to the library was the best cultivator of my imagination. Having access to so many books — and reading them regularly — helped me shape my dreams and pushed me towards higher education in the long run.

My heart broke when I learned recently that the entire Philadelphia public library system was planning to shut down due to lack of funding. Free public libraries are where so many children develop the desire to learn. What investments are people making to ensure threatened closures of public libraries, like the hold-up in Philadelphia, will not happen in the future?

I don’t have cable; but I highly doubt they will reach the panelists and if they do, they won’t merit an answer besides “PRISONERS NEED TO PULL UP THEIR PANTS-AHHHH.” Or “people need to spend less money on the IPODS AND JORDANS and more money in the BARNES AND NOBLE!” Because we know poor people need help dressing themselves and sit as unaffected by consumerist culture as those higher up on the economic food chain.

Cynicism aside, I highly encourage others who plan to watch “About Our Children” to send questions, too. So much so that I’m linking the question box twice. It’s the best way to hold people accountable for what they’re advocating.

for colored girls who need help auditioning for for colored girls

I am excited.

There is going to be auditions for for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange at my alma mater.

And this colored girl sorely misses acting. I haven’t done anything like performance art since leaving undergraduate school. It’s been three long years, and I think I supplanted acting for blogging and writing. I have to have some type of creative healing in my life. It’s my best way of sharing my truth.

The only problem is while I’ve read for colored girls before, and I’ve even performed one of the monologues — I’ve never seen the full play onstage. It helps me sometimes to see plays when I have trouble visualizing how to dramatize them. My mind has always been all over the place with for colored girls.

The audition isn’t until the end of October, and I’ve checked out a copy from the library. But I need you guys to tell me about performances of the play. What drew you to go see it? What do you think of all the ladies? What stood out for you in some of the monologues? I have my own thoughts, and I think I’d be best playing the lady in blue. And I’m a little overwhelmed by my excitement to do this play!

I may try to read a few excerpts and record them… get some feedback. I don’t know. I’m just excited! It’s something other than job hunting to look forward to doing.