good morning

It came to me this morning that it's possible that moving where I've moved is my payback for every nice thing I've ever done in my twenty-eight years.  It's that good.  It also means that it's possible that my good karma balance is at zero again.  Hell.

This morning, I slept until ten, watched three episodes of Girls (which I'm not even sure I like, even if I try to suspend all critiques of its racism. I just keep waiting for another episode to be as good as this one.  That one was so good.), put on my favorite pants,

got a cup of gas station coffee (my favorite kind of coffee),

and went for a walk on the Coastal Trail.

I sat here for a bit,

and as I did, I watched a cruise ship go under the bridge, two kids stepped in poop (one of them stepped in it twice), and I saw a hummingbird.

forcing myself to write this

This coffee shop where I write in the mornings must be the number one spot in SF for AA and Al Anon folks to come and have sponsor/sponsee meetings.  I like that about it.  Mostly, I don’t listen in, because… Anonymous, but there’s just so much talk about steps and self-care and dependency.  The thing I know about folks in recovery – from my life, from movies, from church, from my mornings here – is that they tend to keep it pretty real.  No boring small talk that makes me want to run the hockey puck out of here.

Another thing I like about this place is that the owner knows I want a large coffee for here, but he’s still kinda grumpy with me.  I think it’s because of the shoes (slippers) on the seat thing and because one time I turned the lights on in the back room and he came back and turned them off, telling me, “There’s enough light from the windows and from your screen.”  He plays good music, too.

Joaquín, my roommate, thinks the coffee here sucks, but I don’t mind.  I just miss Dunkin Donuts.

so many pillows in this place

Here's what my morning routine looks like.  (Four for four, y'all!)

Okay, this is one place in the Bay Area that I don't hate.

"Long lay the world / in sin and error pining"

I quit my job (not technically, but basically).  I’m not really sure what to do, so until I figure something out, I’m going to spend an hour writing every morning.

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany.  I think it’s the day that Catholics remember that the wise men, guided by the stars, visited the holy family upon the birth of Jesus.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the part of that story that comes next.  I read it with some folks at a Bible study at Glide a few weeks ago:  King Herod tries to get the wise men to tell them where Jesus is, but since they know he wants to kill the baby rumored to be the new “king,” they deceive him.  Pissed, Herod orders the murder of every male Hebrew child under the age of two.  So as this massive military mobilization gets underway, and as mothers all across the land are wailing for their baby boys, Jesus’ father has a dream in which an angel tells him that the family should move to Egypt.  So they do.  And that’s how God fights back against the mass-scale slaughter of infants – with a damn dream.  I mean, Jesus gets brought to safety, and the story can continue, but… hell.  

The people I read the story with drew connections between the targeting of Hebrew boys then and targeting of Black and Brown boys and men by today’s state.  They told stories of funerals they had been to for victims of homicides.

The day that the non-indictment decision in the Eric Garner case came down, I walked down Mission on my way to a therapy appointment, and I wondered why the fuck everyone was acting so normal.  Mothers all over this country are coping with a terror parallel to that felt by the Hebrew mothers who were Mary's contemporaries; Black people are twenty-one times as likely to be killed by the police as White people are.  I searched my mind for something to do that made more sense that throwing bricks through windows, but I couldn’t think of anything.  Certainly, the way I was expending all of my own energy -- testing kids’ A-Z reading levels and getting them to walk quietly in straight lines and administering district assessments -- made no sense at all.  Doing that work is what I normally do, but I can’t act normally.

An epiphany is when you finally get some insight. Tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany.  The world, represented by the wise men, encounters hope incarnated, "and the soul felt it's worth," as the song goes.  

They encountered hope, and in so doing, triggered the genocidal rage of the oppressor, and hope's answer to that rage is as ephemeral as a dream.  If I was Mary, and I'd just given birth (with no epidural, and in a dirty cave, and in the cold), and my husband (who maybe kinda still thinks that the baby is someone else's) suggested that instead of going home to our families who could help us take care of the baby we move to a new country because he had a dream, I would not have been feeling the divine love. But they did heed the dream. They took radical action and saved the child whose life became that which billions of people across two thousand years have organized their lives around.

So what does it mean to encounter hope now, in this brutal context?  And beyond that encounter, what does it mean for us to practice the radical trust that the holy family practiced, taking not-small measures to move in directions we have never considered and that seem to potentially kinda suck?

And when I say "we" and "us," I clearly mean me.  Because I have no job now.  And I've got rent to pay in twenty-five days.  

Could I BE having a better Sunday morning?

1. Ani DiFranco Pandora station (forgot how much I love her)
2. productivity on grad school application and district funding application
3. fresh pot of coffee since I cleaned the mold out of the machine yesterday afternoon
4. windows open and air cool enough to be able to wear a sweatshirt and pants
5. good lesson plans written for the week
6. grocery shopping done
7. up early enough to do all of this and still be able to get over to church for the first time in a long time
8. little brother coming to visit esta noche
9. Alex and Jessica coming back today, too

The answer is definitively no. This morning could not be any better.
Man, I used to hate Sundays in college.

morning routine

Every morning, I wake up, put on a pot of coffee, make some grits or oatmeal, and get on my computer to read news. It's sometimes the best part of my day, not because the rest of my day is bad, but because it's such a damn good morning routine.

Today, the news I'm reading is a little weird.

super-bored

So, in the last week, for various reasons, I've ventured into campus buildings I've not entered before. Mostly to go to the bathroom. So then I got this idea: maybe this summer, I'll try to go to the bathroom at least once in every building on campus. I need another project.

I'm addicted to stress.

And it's so good to be back in my organized clutter.

These are my feet, and my legs adorned in my recently rediscovered "good sweats."

"Ghetto Bus Tour"

I came across an old copy of the Daily Illini from July in a shop on campus today, and picked it up because the full-page image of a woman with a microphone on a school bus and the headline "Touring the Projects" caught my eye.

The story highlights the work of Beauty Turner, a former resident of the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. Ms. Turner shows the $20-paying customers on her "Ghetto Bus Tour" that "all those news reports [about the violence and drug-activity in the projects] distorted what day-to-day life was like." She says, "All the horror stories that you heard about in the newspapers, it was not like that at all." These tours, she hopes, will help to raise awareness of her cause, alleviating the plight of former residents of the various projects that are being destroyed as part of the Chicago Housing Authority's $1.6 billion "Plan for Transportation." Where are they supposed to go? is what she wants to know. Quite wisely, she observes, "People that come in [to these neighborhoods] don't want to look across the street and see seven little black churches in a three-block radius. What they want to see is a Dominick's, and sushi joints and a Starbucks."

Don Babwin, the AP journalist who wrote the article, doesn't seem to be entirely convinced. Or he might just be presenting both sides of the argument. Anyway, he lists a few of what Turner refers to as the "horror stories" and mentions that the Housing Authority are accusing her of only showing the "bad things" and of "taking a circuitous route so she doesn't have to drive by the new stuff."

Frankly, I'm behind Turner. What exactly will the planned progress look like? Where are these former residents going to live, and where are the seven little black churches going to fit? Without knowing, admittedly, too much about this Plan for Transformation, I'm still a little skeptical.

That said, a tour? How useful is a tour? Babwin reports that Turner's clientele consists of "students, academics, activists, journalists and residents of Chicago and surrounding suburbs -- most of them white and visiting a part of Chicago they've only seen on television or from the expressway as they sped by." I'm torn, because I'm part of that group. I've never spent any time in any of those neighborhoods; I've seen them from the Dan Ryan. At the same time though, making a tourist attraction of people instinctively feels wrong to me. But what would be better?




In other news, classes started today. One of my profs, after placing a fan on the desk on one of my classmates, literally inches from his face, asked us to write down all of our contact information on these recycled business cards that she passed out. But they were already printed on both sides? And then she wrote on the board "Name," "Where you're from," and "Doing with your life" and asked us to introduce ourselves with that information.

Doing with my life? Oh I don't know, today I've been thinking about Ghetto Bus Tours. I'll probably get some coffee later.