"Love is nothing if not ritual."

That was a line in a poem read last night at a vigil at Glide for the nine people murdered in Charleston this week.

Made me think.

retreat

In November, I promised myself that when I felt well enough to enjoy it, I'd come back here, my favorite place.

All I want to do is read and write and, as harmlessly as possible, do whatever the fuck I feel like.

I went down to the thrift store to try to get some sunglasses. I lost mine. I didn't like any of them six dollars' worth (which seems kinda high to me), but I did like the way they'd organized their knick-knack department. (Jess.)

On the way, I saw this. Felt kinda pitifully ironic or ironically pitiful or something because I'm reading Missoula.

I also looked at their CD collection. Last week, at the thrift store in my own neighborhood (which is where I lost my sunglasses), the preponderance of Sarah McLachlan, Indigo Girls, and the Goo Goo Dolls made me think my neighbors must be full of White girls.  But the one today had practically the same collection! Now I'm gonna collect data in every thrift I go into.

"dominance, ego, and authority"

This piece is tripping me up this morning.  Particularly right here: 

Casebolt's behavior, as in all cases of police brutality, was not about protecting and serving. It was about dominance, ego, and authority, and when confronted with a young black girl it manifested itself through a sexual and physical aggression that was patently inappropriate -- but unsurprising. There are some who will say that it is a "reach" to accuse Casebolt of sexual assault. But in the case of a grown man physically dominating a 15-year-old girl, it's hard to see how else it can be described.

Yes.  As someone who has been an important teacher for me said on FB: "This. Is. Sexual. Assault." I don't really have a stomach for reading/watching stuff about child abuse and/or sexual assault, so the on-pointedness of what she's saying here is making me a little nauseous.

"@Xmukexziamx: RT #craigranch #RETWEET pic.twitter.com/kEXV5yCXKS" This is not okay. It's not fucking okay #McKinney

— girl . (@larryftniell) June 8, 2015

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My White woman teacher-friend Mary and I were talking yesterday about being a young White woman authority figure (in the official world) in a classroom where Black and Brown masculinity holds power (in the unofficial world).  

Mary (who's for sure conventionally beautiful) and her (dude) partner are both teaching at the JDC here in the city, and she was explaining to me how interesting it is to get to see how the students there respond to him as a teacher versus her.  In the boys' classroom and in the girls'.  She said that her partner remarked that she seemed to have an easier time connecting to the boys.  She rolled her eyes and said that of course she knew that it had something to do with "being a woman."

And then we had this conversation where for the first time (for me anyway) we acknowledged that sex has a lot to do with teacher-student rapport.  Not actual sex, of course, but... you know, all the swirling stuff associated with sexual attraction.  We both admitted, real awkwardly, that we know that we've used how we look to get an initial in with a student, if that's what it takes to get to someplace where meaningful learning can happen.

I told her how two of my incarcerated colleagues explained to me how a major rapport challenge for them is student resistance to being dominated, and thus emasculated, when the teacher is another incarcerated man.

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Last week, a really shitty experience I had a few months ago with misogyny got resurrected.  I hadn't thought about it for a while, but now it's back to being turned around and around in my head:

A man who was a classmate, and with whom I had a friendship that was rife with sexual attraction (and all the swirling stuff) attacked me in a group email in response to my request to be allowed to write with him and two other men about work that all of us in the group had done together last year.  A favorite excerpt: 

"Don't try and insert yourself now for your "intellectual" labor. You didn't do shit on the original proposal, it wasn't your idea to hold a roundtable, you might've contributed, perhaps, through casual conversation."

Intellectual in quotes.  That's the part that gets me.  The general idea of the whole email is that I didn't do any work because I'm not smart enough to have done so.

In reality, I did a shitload of the work -- both intellectual and logistical.  As well as a lot of straight up grunt work.  All of the other people included on the group email (bar one) reached out to me privately to incredulously affirm that.  

So to this asshole: my work was invisible, my intellect negligible, and my right to a voice in the description of what we did collectively was his to silence or allow.  "Dominance, ego, and authority" all underscored by our history of sort of dating for a little bit and having one drunk night a few months before this exchange, and therefore most definitely underpinned by my vulnerability from being a woman in a (hetero) sexualized context.

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I'm still moshing this all about.  Certainly I don't mean to liken my experience with this fucker to the sexual assault of Dajerria Becton by that fucker.  Hell no.

I guess I'm just pinning them up side-by-side and stepping back to wonder.  Sex and violence.

too much

screenshot from the Stanford AAAS page

huh

Conor does laugh, and (very very rarely) cry, and scream in rage, and puckers up to seek a kiss.  Interesting, right?

I was watching these two people make-out on Powell Street the other day and was struck by how kinda weird kissing is.

One glob of fleshy, watery cells bumping up against another mass.  And that's a thing we do to connect on some level between brute attraction and intimacy.  So weird.

summer bucket list

The WG asked me to write a summer bucket list, what I'd like to do in that 90 day period.  He wisely began his message with an acknowledgment of how the phrase "bucket list" is just harrible.

I'm gonna think about that.  I do love lists.  And I just got a car, so I gotta think of places to drive it.  (It kinda looks like my Nana's car.  I liked it way better when I remembered that.  And it's called "super white.")

One of the things that should be on my list is getting some dang writing done every once and a while.  I wish at least once a week that I had an extra hour to write something here.