Bodies

notes from my visit to the Bodies exhibit, Las Vegas strip, summer of 2012 (en route to New York via the heartland of our country).

Bodies.

the value of certain bodies over others

cutting up / butchering to put on display makes it more animal / more object

         than human

American-centric (poses, activities)

baseball, football, basketball, darts, conductor, frisbee

private parts - demeaning

pieces of faces

keeping bodies intact

death rituals / thinking about the souls of deceased

donated, unclaimed bodies -- outside of Beijing

argue: doctors use bodies for medical training all the time

different intent: donated bodies, medical benefit, education

while these are educational exhibits, there's also some element of freak show shock and awe in the experience/display -- gore element that seemed disrespectful

Bodies purpose -- "become an informed participant in your own healthcare"

"the specimens in this exhibit have been treated with the dignity and respect they deserve" -- afterthought on last wall of exhibit

"Mirrorings"

What does it mean to be a "me"? What is the "I" that speaks when I open my mouth and say things that "I" feel?

I am a baby in front of a mirror, watching the baby in front of me move her hands and feet when "my" brain tells hands and feet to move. Is this what it means to be a "me"? To know through observation what the self can do and observe its movements as if observing another person through a window? I learn what I look like by sitting in front of the mirror and tracing my movements through space and learning the way my face looks when it feels different ways.

=

I am a kid at my first sleepover. For the first time I observe the habits of other girls before they go to sleep. When you are alone in your "youness" for so long you take things for granted, assume they are that way for everyone. I wear nightgowns to bed and never brush my hair. Other girls wear long plaid shorts and spend a long time brushing their thick brown hair. They eat pancakes for breakfast with lots of syrup, and I'm used to eating rice cakes or porridge with my Mom and Dad and sneaking sips from their coffee. I start brushing my hair and wearing plaid shorts too. Later when all the girls start shaving their legs I ask my mom if I can start and she says she never shaved her legs a day of her life and why should I? I resent her at first but I think about my Mom and how beautiful she is and I used to look just like her, and she looked just like me when she was young, and I think I can wait and think about shaving. I grow out of it - 25 years old and I've never touched a razor to my body and I am glad I never will.

=

I ride in the car with my Aunt Peggy, who isn't related to me, but she's my Aunt's sister-in-law and I've been told to be nice. She looks me over, observes my tom boyish clothes, my sneakers and baggy t-shirt and my plain haircut and she's got a full face of makeup which seems strange to me because I've never seen my mother wear more than some perfume and blush even when she goes to a fancy restaurant. Aunt Peggy tells me I'm "white" because I grew up in Kentucky and my Chinese isn't great. I squirm in my seat a little and try not to let my face show how much I want to hate her right now.

=

In middle school, all the black kids in my general classes make fun of me and pull their eyelids tight and make horrible sounds at me. They throw trash at me when the teacher is turned around. In gym class we do fitness tests and I can run faster, longer and do more pushups than most of the boys, and my body fat index is only a 12%, and still the teachers and older white girls in class tell me it's only because I don't have any breasts and they make me feel small and powerless. In the locker room, I'm ashamed to change out of my gym clothes. I don't wear a bra yet because I don't need one and I feel ashamed. I wear my gym shirt under my uniform until the gym semester is over.

=

In high school some boy named Peter makes fun of me and calls me Su Ling, like he's so funny. I hate him in a way I can't articulate and can't do anything with because if I tried to do anything it would result in some kind of violence. So instead I bottle it up inside me and it hurts me more when it should be hurting him. He calls me Su Ling and pretends to speak Chinese at me. He asks me if I can shoot fireballs with my hands and when he finds out I am good at English, that I can write and read, he says I must be "half and half." I want to exact violence on him and think that if I knew how to shoot a fireball now would be the time to find out.

=

I have my mother's nose and my father's chin but my eyes are mine. I grow up thinking I am small and short and skinny and it isn't until I am an adult that I am told I'm pretty for the first time, that I'm "tall for a girl" that I'm "tall for an Asian" that I'm strong and fit and sexy. It's a new thing but I never get used to it, and never can get enough of it.

=

Some people say I look just like my father. Some people say I look like my mom when she was my age. Other people say I look like Anne Curry, or Mulan, or… I get mistaken for "someone I know" a lot. I wonder if there are only so many combinations of features and everyone's unique combination eventually gets repeated. It's inevitable.

=

I've been thinking about genetics a lot. I look at people and I wonder what pieces they got from their parents. I look at my parents and try to imagine if they knew when they got together what their babies would look like. I look at couples and wonder what the products of their coupling will look like.

=

I think back on childhood and adolescence and I think "I'm lucky I got out alive." So much self-hatred and uncertainty about who to be and how to be. So much judgment and scrutiny. When I was teaching middle school I observed my students with a certain level of curiosity. I never had an unattractive student. They all seemed perfect and cute and delightfully endearing. Do children realize how perfect they are, how needless of change? When I was a kid I sought to change everything about myself, the shape of my nose and eyes, the texture of my hair, my skin, my voice, the thickness of my eyebrows, the length of my arms, the size of my chest, the size of my lips. All I could see as a kid was flaws and how to change them. At some point that stopped and I grew into a confident woman who can see the individual beauty in each person, including herself. That is a remarkable thing. To look in the mirror and see flaws but embrace them, to observe them and know that they belong to you.

per aspera ad astra

i decided today that if i ever get a tattoo i'd want it to be of the phrase per aspera ad astra - a Latin phrase meaning "from hardships to the stars." there are so many beautiful reasons i would want this on my body, that i'm tempted to rescind my prejudice that tattoos are tacky and have it inked into my inner arm.

first, i'd like to think that when i die, i'll be borne into the stars. and the idea of my body bearing this phrase, this philosophy, through life until death is exactly what i want my tattoo to be, a comment on im/permanence.

furthermore, this phrase was one of a few audio messages selected to be cast off into space aboard the Voyager, to represent peaceful intentions from humanity. this message was encoded into morse code and recorded on the Voyager Golden Record, along with samples of music, greetings in 55 different languages, animal and nature sounds, and a meditative message from Carl Sagan's wife.

i've never been terribly interested in astronomy nor fascinated with the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life. and yet, i find myself regretting the lack of this kind of fantasy and curiosity in our modern collective imagination. it seems my generation was the last to experience the height of the american space program, and current youth are perhaps untouched by the influence of these ideas and the accompanying sense of infinite exploration, as well as unquantifiable humility in the impossibility of ever being certain in the great big galactic scope of things.

i think that humility, that unknowingness, accompanies a healthy sense of imagination that in turn keeps people from being too ... material in their living. what i feel like we have now is lots of kids growing up and becoming bankers and not enough dreaming of being astronauts.

today's Voyager research (i got lost in a research loop on wikipedia today that started with me trying to sort out my tracklisting for the Dark Was The Night compilation, which led me to read about Blind Willie Johnson and his wailing gospel-blues slide guitar and how it was included as an example of loneliness on the Voyager record to be, potentially, discovered by future extraterrestrial lifeforms) also led me to consider the absurd task of writing and communicating messages to infinite space. in the Voyager capsule, Carl Sagan et al. included a letter from then-president Jimmy Carter:

We cast this message into the cosmos... Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.

i think it's somewhat indicative of the zeitgeist of the 1970s that our president took time out of his schedule to write a letter to the cosmos. imagine what that conversation must have been like, "uh, hey jimmy, we want you to write a letter to the future. to be read by aliens. state our intent as a galaxy. btw, humanity may be completely gone by the time this is picked up by anyone. kthxbye." but that's what i'm talking about, you know? we're missing a little galactic humility and imagination in our present-day thinking.

here i dreamt i was an architect

spending the majority of your day among people half your age and size is an unnatural way of being. this is why our modern educational system is plagued with problems. Freire and Dewey and others have all touched on it before, but now, after 2 years of public school teaching, i'm beginning to fully understand what they mean.

seriously, think about how often you naturally or willfully come into contact with more than 3 or 4 children at a time. it typically doesn't happen because, except for at school, human children don't travel in packs. (unless, of course, they are "wilding".)

thus, i propose we do away with the education system as we know it, and revive apprenticeship! every adult in America should volunteer to adopt 2-3 children/young adults to mentor and guide into adulthood. this would more evenly distribute the adult-child interactions among the population, reduce crime, increase self-esteem among the younger species, increase general feelings of good-doingness, boost humanity's morale, in addition to solving the problems with education. that's like, a whole flock of birds with one giant boulder!

... and i once dreamt of being the next big Secretary of Education...

-stephan!e

memories and realizations

my father always came back from his business trips with presents for his kids. he would hide them somewhere in the house and it was up to us to find them. i got from this two things: 1) presents are all about presentation. the buildup of mystery and suspense was what made the presents interesting, not the presents itself. present = 1) a gift, 2) the now. a gift is always about something more than the physical material thing, it was always about the experience. 2) my success in finding things quickly, i decided, was due to my keen observation skills, which incidentally, might not have developed if they were not put to constant use. consequently, as a child, i always believed i would make a great detective, crime scene investigator, or bounty hunter. after writing, those were my dream occupations and the ones i felt best qualified for.

as i reflect on the way my father instilled excitement and mystery into my perception of the world, i decide that, sometime in the future when i become a parent myself, i will do the same for my son or daughter. hiding the box of cereal every morning before the bus ride to school. hiding the presents on christmas eve. hiding the clues that unveil a big family secret (your great-great aunt is german! your great-grandpa is a war hero! your great-aunt speaks to the dead!)

everyday would/should be a search for hidden treasures.

i got it from my momma

sometimes venturing onto the internet can be a torturous experience. so many young girls growing up in america quoting emo lyrics, lamenting lost "love" and compromising their self-esteem, seeking redemption in fleeting romance, and demeaning themselves to ... sound their age? i don't know, has anyone studied it? is there some self-fulfilling prophecy regarding "age-appropriate" white-suburban-teenage-girl internet behavior?


regardless of precedent, i'm becoming concerned. each day, reading anything on the internet inevitably delivers more wincing reminders of the severe lack of self-love and confidence among our digital-age youth. have the kids grown up so saturated by the media that they no longer know how to exist beyond its limited scope, to the point that they can't imagine a self-image beyond those proliferating the 'net? has society's over-abundance of visual imagery taken all the imagination and mystery out of growing up?

these are things to be pondered in more depth at a later time. the real reason that brings me to this medium right now, is what all this makes me realize: that i am insanely grateful for having grown up with strong, independent women in my life. my mother set a solid example of strength and confidence for me as a child, and i grew up thinking anything was possible if i demanded it of myself. these things are important to acknowledge, for future reference. what kind of woman do i want to be for my child, and how will she see me? will she grow up thinking she needs a man to feel worthy for the world, or will she seek to be her best self, and someone who loves her for that?

hm, an unusually ponderous saturday night post.

...at the end of the day, she realized that the time had passed quickly. and though she couldn’t claim to be efficient with the tasks she needed to accomplish in that day, or in the year, she had, nevertheless, managed to spend her time wisely. and so, she crossed one item off her virtual to-do list and began to get ready for bed...

comparing urban experiences

a portrait i took on the bike path from Hyde Park to upper downtown.
this photograph always exemplified the entire chicago experience for me: contented solitude in the midst of vastness.

you know, it's funny. my friend asked me the other day why i love chicago so much. and i really didn't have a compelling reason for him, aside from the obvious: public transportation, access to concerts, Millennium Park. beyond that and i'd have to go into a longer history of my interaction with that place.

it's not like Chicago's weather is even that great. when i lived there in the summer of 2006 it was sweltering hot and humid, and i lived without a.c. i sucked it up and refused to pay for such extravagance, knowing that strength and endurance emerge from a furnace. when i spent hours in the hot summer sun at Pitchfork and Lollapalooza that year, i hardly even sweat it (idiomatically speaking, that is). when i think back on it, i don't even recall being uncomfortable with the heat. i wore skirts a lot that summer, cut my hair real short, wore bathing suits under my clothes on the weekends. i sweat a lot but learned to not mind so much.

and it's not like life was easy. i worked two jobs, one at the Field Museum and the other as a field journalist/videographer for an indy news group. it was a 9-5 gig with on-call jobs over the weekends and sporadic meetings in the evenings. i remember hating the desk job at the museum at first, but then learning ways of using the space as a resource and finding my own projects to work on. i was never bored and never felt overworked. in fact, i recall working all day on a net neutrality video on a Saturday, from the 1 o'clock lunch with a co-worker that inspired the need for action, walking home writing a script (/rant) in my head, getting back to the apartment, starting up the camera, and recording/editing until 3 am in the morning, just for fun, because the project meant something to me. there were endless reports and meetings to do at the Field as well, but they were always fascinating and exciting and diverse enough in nature that it never became stifling.

it was the first time i'd ever lived in a big city, too. and i was by myself, without a car, without any friends or family in the city, no knowledge of how public trans worked. i was scared to take buses and trains at night. scared to leave the apartment after sun down. it was the first time i'd lived in an apartment (and in the worst part of town!) it was my first time grocery shopping for myself, the first time cooking (or attempting to) for myself. it was my first time using a gas stove, and i was afraid of gas leaks so never ended up using it. this is how my diet came to consist of mostly cold and raw foods for 3 months of my life. i was practically a live vegan, but i ate a lot of cheese and crackers. it was the first time i was overwhelmed with the possibilities of so many things at once, and i was so completely new to the experience of all of it.

but, that was the year i walked everywhere. and, when i got tired of walking, i found a couple who was willing to lend me a bike for the summer, and i rode along Lake Michigan and explored the city beaches. that was the year i joined Critical Mass and made 1,000 friends at once. that was the year i did yoga after work on the floor of a Maori house exhibit in the museum, and again in Millennium Park on weekend mornings, saluting the sun thru metallic beams. i spent afternoons walking thru art museums or photographing street performers. i read a book a week. i drew! i wrote poetry and listened to music. i danced. i took 30 minute train rides to chinatown to eat mango fried rice from a bamboo bowl. and that was the year i accidentally stranded myself in the worst part of town when the trains stopped running. it was the year i learned to make salsa from scratch and all-natural ingredients, and the year i fell asleep listening to Band of Horses' Funeral almost every night.

it's amazing to me to remember all of this, and there is still so much i could say. and though i have a penchant for reminiscing, this is hardly nostalgia at all, memory imbued with illusion from the passage of time. for though i never ate warm foods, and never had a.c., and was always working and walking and alone, i never felt unhappy, unfull, uncomfortable, or hungry. i was restless for more, but always well-rested, my skin was glowing and i felt young and alive and vibrant.

---

compare with now: i live with a childhood friend, but we hardly talk. i feel alone most days, even though i have many friends in the city and family nearby as well. i have a car but i'm terrified of driving it. LA traffic scares me and driving with the windows down is no longer considered part of a pleasurable experience. i lament missing good concerts b/c the venues are far away and the shows expensive. i have a fully functional kitchen and though i've gotten good at making fod for myself, i don't enjoy it, and hardly have the appetite for anything i make. still, i feel constantly hungry, go to bed hungry some nights. i don't sleep well, i toss and turn, waking up worrying it's 7 am when it's not even 3:30 am. i watch a lot of tv, hardly ever read, and even though i am always working or preparing to work, i never feel i've accomplished anything.

and LA's weather is fine, but i hardly ever enjoy it.

proposition: blogging as life preserver

i've had a lot of conversations lately in which my motives for blogging were called into question. and though i find it hard, usually, to think so metacognitively about the reasons for my writing, i realized today that it's a tree in the forest kinda thing.

if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?

i remembered this post i wrote in the beginning of my foray into blogging, and how i was thinking about death and the ability of the internet to preserve experience and writing.

this digital age is a mausoleum, which is a word i love, because it sounds like what it means: "death museum." we produce so many artifacts of our lives, but at the same time these artifacts exist mostly in the ether. we write emails, dozens a day, these all go into mailboxes, each of us with mailboxes thousands of emails full. there's a permanence but also an invisibility to this kind of production. while it exists and accumulates, it so easily disappears. someone dies, their email address and inbox goes with them. all those MB's of virtual space and productivity and creation lost, irrecoverable. and here, i hesitate again, because this virtual medium has the capacity to recover and revive, just as easily as it can be erased.

i want to remember things clearly, i don't want things to fade!

the wonderful thing about this is that digital technologies are allowing us to preserve little mummies of ourselves all over the interwebs (which sounds kind of gross, but admit it, you're fascinated!) snapshots of life and moments. and the complexities and details of our lives will read, in retrospect, so much clearer than any other materials of the past or present. just as the clarity with which we see things has improved with the emergence of digital imaging and hi-res photography, our understanding of the past will be significantly clearer because of the details we are writing now. we are constantly writing and re-writing our own autobiographies, from the moment we self-publish.

and isn't that such a beautiful thing?

-stephan!e

(written sunday, 3.22.09, 9pm PST)

observations, february ed.

time passes slowly when you're paying attention to it and "a watched pot never boils." why is that? why are the laws of physics and time bendable only when they result in our disappointment?

to illustrate my point, some facts: there are 16 weeks left of school and 5 weeks before spring break. it is only february 2009, the second semester has just begun, but my students are already growing out of their 6th grade innocence, starting fights, using obscene language, defying authority, referencing (and imitating) sexual acts, and acting like obnoxious, entitled teenagers. each day i gratefully mark off another day from my calendar but i know very well that 16 weeks like this will feel infinitely punishing.

another fact: no matter how much ppl say that keeping busy helps to pass the time, it simply isn't true. i work 8 hours a day and go to night school, i exercise vigorously for 2 hours every other day, i write when i can and cook, and sometimes i even read, i eat, i shower, i brush my teeth, i watch tv, i talk to friends and go for lonely walks, i get stuck in traffic, i occasionally go shopping, i watch movies, i chew my carrots slowly, i go to sleep, but the only time that passes quickly is on the weekends.

---

other sad truths: now that i'm deprived of pleasant companionship, i'm eating more. when my boyfriend was home, i lost 7 pounds b/c i was eating normal portions again. the love and companionship was filling, so i could eat less and still feel full. now that he's gone and i'm alone again, i'm eating more, eating constantly. food is a convenient companion: an apple in my backpack, a box of crackers in my lunchbox, granola bars in the car's passenger seat. perhaps i'm eating to fill some void. maybe i'm eating to grow a thick layer of fat between me and my surroundings. i convinced myself once i was bulking up in an effort to intimidate my students (still not there yet). eating is a pass-time i use to fill in gaps between activities or stressful tasks. it is a practice engaged to fill up time between now and the summer. i expect to gain lots of weight before then.

i'm glad that this is not a leap year. that is one less day i have to worry about being in the classroom. i'm thankful for the little things.

EDIT: i just got back from the gym. i've already gained 2 pounds in the week he's been gone. 16x2... that's more than a third of myself i'm gaining before this is over...

-stef

new wisdom

i would like to append to my last post, as a new realization occurred to me, just now, as i was finishing my soup:

it takes a brave person to admit failure and inadequacy and step out of the way for progress to occur.
but, it takes an even braver person to admit failure, change, adjust, and reflect on her inadequacies and be the progress that needs to occur.

i just hope i can be the latter.

-stef

admitting failure

i came to a significant realization this morning:

it takes courage to admit you are not suited to help someone. because we all desire to be wanted and needed in some way, it takes love and courage to realize you are unfit and inadequate to be what someone else wants you to be, and walk away. to do this, one must deal with being accused of selfishness, immaturity, callousness, and self-importance. but i think the act of coming to understand you are not the person someone else needs is actually an act of considerable humility and self-knowing.

i think i've spent most of my life looking for ways to help ppl, or to change the world and make it a better place, without realizing that i had been selfish about it. i was thrill-seeking, but replace "thrill" with "good vibes." i was an endorphins fiend. i like feeling good about myself, and i like doing things that make me feel good. activism, i suppose, was my drug of choice.

another way to understand today's realization is the distinction between theory and practice. in theory, i believe every child is entitled to a quality education, but in practice, i am not the one best suited to provide that education. in theory, inner-city students with disabilities should be just as capable to meet educational standards as their peers in the suburbs. but in practice, they can only do so if they have a teacher committed to the tedious and wearing task of getting them there (and i don't have the patience or endurance to be that teacher they need). in theory, i am a capable and experimental teacher with ambitious ideas for transformative democratic education and student empowerment. in practice, i am a struggling, deeply unhappy special education teacher, disempowered and disillusioned because of my failure to effectively practice what i believe in theory, and my growing lack of passion for education.

i accept full responsibility for my own misery, knowing that if i had only known myself better and been more humble, i would not have taken on the task of teaching special ed in south central LA, thinking i could handle whatever challenges were thrown at me. some things are beyond yr range of ability. it's not even that i had delusions of grandeur, thinking i could change the whole system of education by teaching 60+ special ed students. i was just hoping to make a difference in the lives of a few. but now i am facing the reality that i might emerge from the experience 2 years later and regret the attempt at all, thinking both my students and i would have been better off if i'd never stepped foot into a special ed classroom. moreover, i feel i may be driven away from education forever. that makes me feel deeply sad and lost, since i thought teaching was the way i would make an impact on the world.

it occurs to me this morning that sometimes it is the more honest and necessary thing to step away from a situation, knowing you are beyond your means, that there is nothing for you to contribute. it is knowing that you want to be able to help others, but that you are not the one best able to do it, and stepping out of the way to let those who can do what you cannot.

return to the single life

i miss this.

if you read this regularly and wondered where i'd disappeared to in the last 2 weeks, yr answer is this: i've been here all along, but away from my computer! what do you think about that?!

the truth is that i spend far more time on the internet when i am alone. i used to worry i have become technology-dependent, but i realize now that it's just a proxy for communicating with ppl i can't live without. hm, well, that and a convenient distraction. but i could quit if i wanted to, and i did!

2 weeks was the exact amount of time my boyfriend was in LA. we were making up for lost time. 6 months is a long time not to see someone who makes you obliviously and ridiculously happy. but now he's gone again, still in transit on his return to that lucky country of Turkey. and now things are quiet and lonely. it's back to cooking dinners for two and only eating half, saving leftovers in tupperware containers, not drinking wine and lighting candles, brushing my teeth all by myself, taking a week to finish a carton of orange juice, taking a week and a half to finish a loaf of bread, waiting in line at the grocery store all by myself, sorting receipts and grading papers, working out obsessively and yes, blogging, twittering, tumblring, and checking email because now i have the time.

there are infinite daily events in modern life that have the potential to be either extremely gratifying or intensely miserable. these ritual behaviors can be vastly improved by pleasant companionship, eased by a reassuring hand or the proximity of a familiar human touch. unfortunately, these are frequently things we take for granted, and these events comprise the majority of every day. and as with so many things, we notice and lament the lack more than we appreciate the presence, sometimes. it is bad enough to feel so alone, but then something as small as getting into a car and looking over to the passenger seat and realizing there's no one there to talk to or hold yr hand thru rush hour traffic, or to notice all the leftover pasta in the pan after you're already full, those are things that make you heartsick.

coming back to my apartment last night after dropping Ben off at the airport encapsulated the feeling that lingers this evening as i write this, that will probably persist in all its manifest forms for the next 4 months until i see him again or have another visitor: an empty apartment, only my clothes in a messy heap on the chair, pillows stacked on one side of the bed, one set of towels, one toothbrush in a cup.

i once wrote that returning to an empty apartment after weeks of constant companionship is perhaps the most depressing experience imaginable. but i was wrong. what saddens me most is returning to the way life is, rather than the way it could be.

-stephan!e

callousness

teaching special ed in south central LA is an extremely trying task. (as i type this, i'm thinking, 'that is the understatement of the century!' there are no words in the english language – any language – to describe the anguish and frustration that accompany my job. in fact, those emotions are perhaps better expressed and communicated by the animal kingdom, where the guttural and primitive sounds of pain and distress found in feral animals are more appropriate for my sense of life-threatening anxiety.)

anyway, the point is that my job is difficult. and as with most things potentially stressful or dangerous, one must find ways to adapt, methods and strategies by which to adjust to your surroundings. in the name of survival, you do what you can to change your surroundings, and when your surroundings don't change, you change yourself. adaptation. evolution. selection. you pick and choose what to process, what to act on, you filter your thoughts, you let some things roll off so you can keep rolling on.

my recent environment-induced adaptations have included: reclusiveness, watching TV, eating a lot of ice cream, superstitions, a nagging urge to start smoking, and increased emotional numbing.

the last is the most troubling b/c it is at once the most necessary and the most regrettable. i think that the trouble with the school environment is that it tends to bleach everyone of their humanity. in order to get thru my day, i have to be able to tune out the 1,000+ insults and slurs i hear my students tossing around. i tried at the beginning to reprimand and deliver a lecture for every "stupid" "retarded" "faggot" "homo" "nigger" etc. i heard, but that soon became a herculean task. it would hurt every time i heard such hateful words used, so i had to deaden my sensitivity to such things. if i stopped class every time i heard someone call me or another student a bitch, we would never get through all the standards we need to by May.

adaptation, selection, you pick and choose your battles because there's no time or energy for everything.

it feels strange, but not surprising, to open a science book and see that a student wrote "Fuck you Ms. Lee. You are a chinese bitch" on the plate tectonics vocabulary and not really care, shrug my shoulders, get a black marker pen and cross it out so that the next student doesn't get more excited by the graffiti than the part about the San Andreas fault. if i let it get to me, i wouldn't be ready for the next group of students coming in for their math lesson, and i have to be ready to teach them how to solve a one-step linear algebraic equation.

what bothers me most, however, is that this callousness, this thick skin i grow to get through my day, also prevents me from feeling the gratitude and relief i should feel when, while picking up trash left on the floor, i come across a desk with pencil markings on the tabletop. the graffiti reads, "Ms. Lee is a nice teacher. you should respect her." or the one on the other desk, which says, in big block letters with swirly lines around it, "Ms. Lee: good teacher 4 lyfe." these things should cause me to smile and feel lucky, but i shrug, move the desk back into its row, and wish my kids would stop marking up the furniture.

later, i think back on the day i had: a student accused me of racism, saying, "chinese ppl hate black ppl." another one climbed up on a table and tried to jump out an open window, all for a little attention and the laughs of his peers. 2 students were sent to the dean's office, and i caught another one for ditching class. it's February and i still can't get this class to sit still or be attentive long enough to teach them to multiply decimals and fractions.

if i hadn't grown these emotional callouses, i shudder to think about the emotions i'd be feeling right now.

instead, what i feel: relief that the day is done, and a slight smile in remembering that a certain someone is coming back to visit me today. i'm hoping that some time away will help me remember what it's like to laugh again, and be a kid myself. hopefully this recovers my humanity. hopefully i'm not completely dead yet.

hopefully there is still time to save this vestigial sense of feeling.

-stephan!e

the last of 2008

i woke up this morning and lay in bed thinking about 2008...

i taught my first class(es) in 2008. i wrote my first thesis in 2008. i moved away from home and into my first apartment in 2008. i started my first job in 2008.

i met Grizzly Bear in 2008.
i built a bookpress and hand-bound books in 2008. this blog reached 20,000 readers in 2008!

i've learned to appreciate home and my family in new ways, and i learned what it's like to fall completely in love with someone in 2008.

...and now, in the dark, on the floor of my parents' living room in the house of my childhood, next to a dying fire, with the miserable tv on in the background, i'm thinking about 2008 again. it really has been a great year.

and 2009 is going to be even better, i know it.

with love,
stephan!e


post-script: my half-hearted and last-minute attempts to live twitter new year's eve. could have been fun if longer-lasting. alas, noted for next year!

ephemera

i spent the day slowly wrapping gifts. my lethargic fingers were miserable negotiating pesky scissors and tape.


it doesn't feel like christmas this year, and i wonder if/fear that my increasing inability to experience holidays with the excitement and anticipation of the g/olden days means i am getting old/ losing my childhood ways.

but, i think it's because i'm more grateful to be home than any other year, and that makes these entire 3 weeks feel like a gift, rather than just the one day.

with love,
stef

sunday

the peaceful quiet of an empty apartment and all the neighbors gone on holiday,

the coziness of the kitchen while making dinner and the comforting whir and warmth of my new space heater, and

the look of the sky as the day is ending, the clouds backlighting the palm treetops with raspberry and tangerine

and a playlist of songs about the left and leaving, and a living room to dance and jump in

and, for once, not dreading monday

and, knowing i'm going home in only a few more days

make me feel, finally, that i could grow to love LA.

idealist

i joined Idealist.org about a year ago, when graduation was pending and "the future" we'd always talked about but never really pondered was looming, no, was here. i was terrified i would collect my diploma in May and then have nowhere to go and nothing to do. after 16 years comfortably riding out the formal education system and its strongly set paths, the idea of the track suddenly ending and launching me forward with no idea of what lay ahead was worrisome.

i think this fear of the unknown is dangerous; rather than explore the possibilities and potentials of the unknown and undecided, we are swept into fates we don't want b/c of fear of failure. i think this is particularly true among the freakishly driven and busy, those whose schedules drive them to the point of burnout and leave them with hardly any sense of what "free time" means. suddenly the idea of not having something to pour all yr energy and time into feels like failure. why?

the point of this post is this: i felt that after struggling with the process of writing my undergraduate thesis, i needed a break from higher ed, wanted to put off grad school, and avoid law school. i figured working a job in the meantime while i sorted out my feelings for formal ed was a good idea. and so i signed up for Idealist to look for jobs, something to fall back on in the next year.

that was a year ago, and i still get the emails. i can't bring myself to unsubscribe from their email list b/c, admittedly, i guess i'm still looking. i check their emails, every day, to see what alternate lives i could be living: lead filmmaker in Venice, community organizer in Chicago, youth media coordinator in NYC, and lament the disparity between my current job and the work i could be doing instead. every time i read about a new job, a different salary, a different locale, i imagine completely different lives and wish i had been more comfortable with uncertainty.

-stephan!e

whipped cream cheese

an epicure-ious observation of Los Angeles:

since i've moved here, the only thing i've seen Angelinos serve with their bagels is whipped cream cheese. i didn't find it particularly odd the first few times, i figured ppl living in LA are more sensitive to calories and somehow justify the indulgence of cream cheese by thinning it out and stirring air into it, but still... does no one in this crazy town like their cream cheese thick and rich, the way i do?

i've never found cream cheese, or any dairy product for that matter, particularly appetizing in its whipped and airy manifestations. i thought the idea of air in my dairy was ridiculous, unsatiating, and a little gross. i want more bang in my bite, you know?

nevertheless, that's all i see being served up in LA, and this weekend, without realizing the symbolic significance, i opted for a tub of whipped honey nut cream cheese at the grocery store. i ate it this morning, spread thick on a piece of toast with sliced bananas.

i wonder if slowly all these little changes will make me a (reluctant) Angelino after all.

trickery!
-stephan!e

a reflection on home and the symbolism of voting

long title. this post became more than i intended it to be when i began.

continuing with my voter anxiety: i have a horrible confession to make: i hadn't planned on casting a vote today. i know! shame! hypocrisy! hisssss!!! i had many reasons, the biggest being that i recently moved and felt confused about my sense of home, and how that translated into bureaucratic paperwork concerning change of address declarations. even tho the DMV and my place of emploi instructed me to change my official home address to my current LA spot, i was still stubbornly inclined to retain my sense of belonging in the midwest. i thought of my last 2 elections and the idea of having a swing vote in Ohio sounded too good to pass up for what seemed like a throw-away vote in CA. my place of residence may be official on paper, but in my heart, i could feel myself torn between three states: my latest voter registration was done in Ohio, but under a dorm room address which hasn't technically been my residence for 3 years now. and my "permanent home address" which is in Lexington, KY – eventhough i went away for school and now for work, i still return from time to time and it is still, indelibly, home. and then my current residence in LA County, CA, which eventhough it's the address on all my bills, my employment papers, and my new (and involuntary!) CA driver's license, is still just a transitional place to stay in my mind, a layover between destinations. i just couldn't figure it out. with a mind like mine, the address line is just too vague and nondescript to account for such arguments regarding identity. and the harsh words at the bottom of all my voter registration papers, warning against felony, perjury, and fraud for inaccurate information didn't exactly inspire confidence in me, nor encourage a speedy decision.

so the time flitted away. every day i would look at the two forms i had printed out (i found differing forms on the internet, one much shorter than the other, both very hard to read and understand, both containing the frustrating address line, neither very helpful or voter-friendly) and literally sweat as i tried to figure out what to do. perhaps i could have sought help, perhaps i could have just done what made sense and registered in my current state of "residence." i dunno, it's hard to explain why i couldn't make a decision. but i will tell you that what should have been a simple task was becoming an existential dilemma and one that was paralyzing me from action. (haha, to which i implore you to imagine how i was at the actual polls! i bet a lot of you might be thinking that maybe ppl like me (that is: indecisive ppl) are best left out of the voting process. and to that i would say, "perhaps you are right.")

anyway, so the time passed and still i could not figure out what to do, until eventually the decision made itself. i missed the window for registering absentee in KY, and then OH, and then CA's window quickly approached and i still wasn't sure what to do. i got someone else's mail-in-ballot in my mailbox and opened it, ready to cast her vote for her, thinking "if her ballot's here, where is mine?" and wondering pseudo-philosophically "if a vote is mailed but never cast, does it still count?" sadly, the law and fear of FELONY on my permanent record prevented me from doing anything, again (do you kinda see what i'm getting at? clearly there's a problem if even an educated and civic-minded person such as myself feels paralyzed from exercising her basic civic duty.)

so eventually, i resigned to not voting. too much stress, too much paperwork, my mind felt twisted and confused and i couldn't figure out what i was supposed to do and how to go about doing it. i gave up on trying to figure out the complications of the system, telling myself it didn't matter anyway, KY would surely go red and i was sure Obama would be pocketing CA (later, i spoke to my parents on the phone and my mom talked about the McCain-Palin signs on the lawn surrounding our house, and KY going republican. "ridiculous!" she said. i love her.) i wished i could vote from ohio, but i had been following polls and was getting more and more sure that it would tip toward Obama in the final days. so i didn't really feel too bad for a while. i pretended i voted already, that no matter where i cast my vote, it wouldn't have mattered anyway. i wasn't realizing the empowering (and potentially disempowering) symbolism of my decision.

when it got closer and closer to the election, i began to resent myself for it. i hadn't given thought to Prop 8 (ban on same-sex marriage – vote no!) and the abortion amendment, and my representatives in the House, or even to the fact that i could vote for Nader if i wanted (which i promised i would, and did! read on...) whenever any one of my students asked me if i voted i of course lied so as not to create in their minds a sense of political apathy or powerlessness. and with all their fervor and excitement, i didn't want to be a buzzkill. of course i was excited too, but i just felt so miserable for regretting my decision and inability to join in.

and so this kept building up until finally today, at the end of my school day, i was talking to Ben. and from across the world in Turkey, he's been following the election coverage, eagerly awaiting the results, and he happened to ask me, very casually, if i voted. "i want to know what is happening with the election. did you vote?" and i had to be honest and try to explain why "no, i did not vote" and why i didn't vote in CA, nor OH, nor even KY. and the more we talked, and the more i tried to explain it, the more ridiculous i felt. and even after i explained it to Ben, it still didn't make sense to me and probably didn't make sense to him either. and for the 2 hours after that, i kept thinking about it, feeling worse and worse, more guilty, more regretful, more hypocritical. i couldn't think about anything else during my professional development meetings after school because i felt like a liar and a hypocrite. the entire time i was supposed to be in department meetings unit-planning, i was trying to forget about my overwhelming sense of guilt. on my drive home, every crowded block i passed, i craned my neck and risked taking my eyes off the road for the brief moment it took to eye the lines at the polls, to observe crowds of ppl waiting to cast their votes, and fill with a sense of excitement and reminiscience for a memory i have of walking the streets in Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnatti, Ohio in 2004, and the electricity of anticipation and solidarity between all the ppl i met in the street, everyone joining together in exercising civic rights and responsibilities. and then i called home trying to reach my dad, who has been known to occasionally skip voting in elections, much to my mom's and my annoyance. after talking to Ben, i thought i would at least call and try to urge my dad to the polls, in case he didn't remember or had made a decision similar to mine. and so he picked up the phone and i asked him, "did you vote?" and he said, very easily and matter-of-factly, that he did, that my mom went in at 8:30 and he went at 9 am before work, and even though it was a 40-minute wait in line, he was happy to do it. and then he asked me, and when i had to explain it to him, i felt horrible. i was born in the states in the '80s and never had to earn my citizenship or fight for my suffrage, but thinking about the opportunity i had to vote, and how i let it go to waste so easily, made me physically ill and uncomfortable. i couldn't live with that.

as soon as i came home, i explained to my roommate that i had resolved, during my drive home, to attempt a provisional ballot, even if it's merely palliative. so we packed into the Prius and drove to our precinct polling location and i went thru all the bells and whistles and waited in all the various lines, told my story over and over to the polling officials (by now, i've gotten good at explaining my confusion) and finally, they handed me a provisional ballot and an hour later, lo and behold:

I VOTED!

i relished reading every single amendment and proposition in detail, using my little pen to punch in my decisions, and enjoying a sense of solidarity with everyone in that room.

oh, and since i'd already decided my presidential vote wouldn't matter to Obama, i cast it very proudly for Nader. :-)

such a relief and happy resolution to a tense couple of months.

watching the celebrations all over the nation reminds me of new year's eve. it feels like a new age is dawning.

love,
stef

p.s. i like comparing this to my last elections/voting post, here. gotta love the images.