My soul feels tired.

sympathy

I saw a stunningly gorgeous (in a conventional way -- White, blonde, thin, probably a symmetrical face or something) woman the other day, and my first thought was, "Oh hell, it must be horrible for walking down the street.  So many men looking her up and down and yelling at her."

No doubt there are privileges, too.  

Mrs. Ellen Riggins

I made a note to myself at the top of my Gmail tasks list about this time last year ago: racketball.

About all I was doing at that time was rewatching West Wing and Friday Night Lights. 

In the first episode of the third season of FNL, everything is going to hell.  For Smash, who had been a star player during his senior year (and during the whole first and second season), shit’s bleak.  He’s recoverning from an injury, but he;s told that he’ll never be back to the condition he was in before he got hurt.  He’s freaking out in the steaming rage under the surface way that’s the only method of grief that hypermasculinity allows for.

Coach Taylor (dreamy Coach Taylor) picks him up one night without notice, and in the next scene, they’re in a racketball court, both still in their work clothes.  There’s lots of grunting and sweat, etc., and Smash is like, “Coach, my life is over, and also why are we playing racketball, ‘the Whitest sport ever’?”

They’re playing racketball because running football drills ad nauseum would not do the trick.  Smash needs to restore his speed and agility, and racketball demands plenty of both.  (Coach Taylor doesn’t say as much, but that’s the unspoken reason.)

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There’s sometimes wisdom, I think, in not taking a challenge head on.  In coming around instead with creativity.  

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I never knew that selling wedding dresses and volunteering in a prison was gonna work as a method for feeling purposed.  But it’s turned out to be way more effective than the linear path I took because I thought I was supposed to – good grades, then degree, then job, then you win.  That shit did not work.

months in the making

Friday morning, B and I stepped away from the meeting in the math room to finish up the pages going into the reader.  C was there, and Ms. G was leaving, so we had to (got to) have him copy it all for us right then.  While C was running our second copy through, and while I was working on the Table of Contents of his computer, B fidgeted and paced.  We both kept glancing over to Ms. G’s office where C stood at the copier.  B said, “I feel like I’m waiting for my child to be born,” and I totally agreed.  My giddy fingers kept hitting the wrong keys, and I kept frantically backspacing.

I let B take care of hole-punching because it has to be exact, and I don’t have the patience for that shit.  Needed an artist’s handling.

When it was time to press the lever that would curl the plastic spine through the  holes, B called me over to press it with him.

A whole lot of high fives were exchanged.

why just youth

The prison's newspaper hosted a forum for educators earlier this month, attended by about forty people, fifteen free and twenty-five incarcerated.

The men in blue impressed – sharing their stories of incarceration, their epiphany moments, the highlights of their rehabilitation process.  Many men shared their genuine for using their stories and talents to “help the youth.”

Again and again, we reiterated how important it is to build meaningful relationships with the youth before it’s too late.

And again and again we heard inspiring stories of men upwards of their thirties coming into their own, recognizing their own sacredness, their own power.

Why, then, in the face of example after example of programming empowering an adult to radically change his life – even adults sentenced to life in prison, adults who have committed horrible crimes – why do come to conclusion that it’s all about the youth?

I think it’s because we want to prevent. If we “catch them when they’re young,” the cliché goes

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The Teachers 4 Social Justice Conference was a couple of weekends ago.  I didn’t go because the pervasive Bay Area “lefter than thou” attitude intimidates me, then makes me very tired and lonely.

R went, though, and he told me about a brilliant line from K's keynote speech, a reminder that kids are living their lives right now, that adults marginalize children’s realities when they think of them as mere precursors to the full humanity that comes with aging.  Educators can live with kids right now – can feel their pain right now, can share their love right now – rather than limit our concerns about them to their futures in “the real world.” 

I think that’s also part of why I got so knotted up about the “catch them while they’re young” thing.  The “by the time they’re in high school it’s too late” thing. 

It’s not because kids will one day be adults that they deserve support, that they deserve empowering community.  It’s because they’re human beings right now.  And, we don’t “age out” (one of my favorite terms from the disability world…) of the need for support, for community.