Aunt Crappy

I love getting to know my brothers' kids personalities.

I was texting with my niece this morning about an art project I'm doing where I scaled up a photo, and she said, "Cool I love math and art good combo."

And I was FaceTiming with her brother who was teaching me about Minecraft, telling me that his favorite part is getting to play with other people on the server.  There's one friend he has, he told me, who gets bullied at school but has friends on Minecraft.

I bought a book for the little one the other night that is right in tune with his kind of twisted sense of humor.

Adam / Eve / Steve / Stevette

Last night in Bible study we hosted Pastor Yee from the Nineteenth Avenue Baptist Church.  Who knew Baptists could be so rad?

We read Genesis 2 (starting at verse 5) and 3 -- basically the Garden of Eden story.  That's a well-trod one and one I usually just dismiss as yeah-yeah-every-culture-has-creation-stories.  If anything, when I think about it, I just get annoyed at modern Christians who read into the "woman came from man's rib" and "Eve fucked up" things and find justification for male supremacy.  Also shit like this.  Puke.

She suggested a reading though, that looked at the Garden story not as prescriptive transgression and punishment story (i.e. Listen to God or else...), but as a descriptive story that can help us think about the nature of humanity in relation to God.  She explained that most Biblical scholars believe that this part of Genesis comes from the Jahwist source which is characterized by an emphasis on relationship.

We didn't get all into the from-the-rib thing, but we did talk about the names Adam and Eve, prompted by T, a transwoman who told us that she was mostly of the mind to just throw out all this Adam and Eve bullshit because it has nothing to do with the loving God she knows.  "What about Steve?" she asked, "And Stevette?"  She insisted that the trans community has always existed and that the gender binary in this story is a bunch of bullshit.  Boom.

Adam, PY agreed, is the Hebrew word for human.  (Flashback to the first year of college, when we learned to push back on the idea that the man is the universal and that then woman is a variation; that White is universal, and that People of Color are variations from that norm.)

I was still tripping on the part that went, "And he called her Eve because she would be the mother of all the living."  That cause and effect relationship made no sense to me.  Sounded a little like "because I said so."  So when I asked, PY told us that "Eve" is a lot like the Hebrew word for "living," which is kind of interesting.  God created humans, and then so that humans could have companionship, God created living.  I'm gonna keep thinking on that one.

So eventually the two major tensions that we got to in this story are:
(1) That we are not God.  That's what we came to know when we decided to do things our way instead of God's way.  Reading it this way, the silliness of the don't-eat-that-tree rule can fall away as just one arbitrary instantiation of God's order:  When we follow God's rules, participate in God's order, we experience Eden.  Eden: all creation living harmoniously. When our free will leads us away from God's just order, we eventually experience the humiliating pain of relative powerlessness before God -- a pain that can translate into the trampled end of oppression, but also the trampling.  Those with "power" (in the human sense) deceive themselves as somehow deserving of it, as somehow godlike.

We are not God.  We are not eternal. We know death -- not because we are being punished with it as a result of Eve's disobedience, but because death is fundamental the experience of humanity.  There was death in the Garden before they fucked up.  It takes a lot of death to make living possible. Plants and animals die for our consumption, and for consumption by innumerous other species.  But in right relationship with God, trusting absolutely in God's provision, we could live without the overwhelming desire to put off death.  We wouldn't scramble to create ways for us to have power over death.  We'd know we're not God and be cool with that.

(2) That we are image-bearers of God.  When after they hide from God and are found, God asks them, "Who told you you were naked?"  God made us Good, but then when, as a result of our free will, the world came out of God's order, we came to "know" that we are not good enough as we are, that we have reason for shame.

I thought of the question that's been hanging around me over the past few months.  I was telling my therapist a story that I was thought was fairly inane about a dude whose attention I'd wanted so badly in college.  My tone was amused, self-deprecating; it's not an issue for me anymore -- over it.  I was smiling, but she wasn't.  She does that.  Makes me take myself more seriously than I'm wont to do.  My storytelling ended abruptly when she interrupted me saying, "I wanted to be important enough to him that..." to ask me, "Ellen, who taught you that you're not important?"

"Who told you that you were naked?  I made you Good."

When we thought about it that way, it made sense to us why Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, from absolute harmony.  If we'd followed God's plan, lived under God's justice, we would be unconcerned with our not-Godness and we would be in touch with our Goodness.  We wouldn't know power struggles -- on interpersonal and international levels.  We wouldn't know war, rape, the use of imprisoned bodies for profit.  We wouldn't have to know.

The word ignorance was tossed around the table.

I thought about the afternoon a few years ago when I was driving home by myself, up 57, and I got a call from my principal.  I love driving up and down 57 between Champaign and Chicago, but that's because I generally run melancholy.  For most of the year, it's not not a bleak landscape.  Definitely bleak in late November, which is what I'm pretty sure it was.

This, but waaaaaaay grayer.

She told me that the school-wide antiracist project that R and I had been working our asses off to launch had failed to meet a hurdle it had to meet in order to move forward.  All our efforts were essentially for naught.  It'd be dishonest to withhold the truth that the humiliation of such a public failure didn't sting.

But when I got to thinking about it, I got viscerally overwhelmed by the realities of the what it looks like for racism to keep sneakily and slowly but steadily pushing our babies out of our classrooms and into prisons.  Most of the way up, I earnestly wished (as embarrassing as it is to admit) that I'd never learned what I have about racism.  I tried to understand why so many of our colleagues refused to get on board with our project, and I thought back to high school, when I had no idea I was White and that it mattered.  I could have had the English teacher life I'd imagined for myself when I sent in my college applications: drinking tea before a sea of adoring students who behaved just like I wanted them to and who loved literature like I did.  My own book club.  That possibility seemed so fucking blissful as I drove up, my shitty driving worsened by the sobbing that was puffing up my eyes.

But I do know, and I know that it's better that I do.  What I didn't want to know, but was having to confront, was not just that racism is ubiquitous, but that I am almost powerless before it.  "Ignorance is bliss," but not really because the more life-giving, sustainable thought is, "I am not God."

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.

Brought to you by first grade me.

not sure what the point of this is

Things what I like:

Watching/napping through Law and Order for several hours at a time

Bad black coffee

TJ Maxx and Marshalls

Buying picture books for my brothers’ kids

Reading long books
Earnestness

My brothers’ taste in sisters-in-law for me

The Indian pizza place at the bottom of the hill I live on

Wearing my slippers to the coffee shop in the morning

The owner of this coffee shop always telling me to take my shoes off the seat, but they’re slippers

My own handwriting

Watching the fiddle be played

Talking on FaceTime

Sitting really close on the couch to any family member

When Ricky Gervais farts on Karl Pilkington and then lays on the floor laughing starting at 17:51 in this video

Sending people packages

Gold

The Memorare

When people say “Word.” And ‘Word?”

Gendered insults for dudes (e.g. quit being such a dick)

Videos of my niece and nephews doing cool things

When my roommate says things are “fantastic,” but they don’t seem fantastic to me

All cheeses

The song they sing at the beginning of Glide services

Friendship bracelets
Eavesdropping

Things what I don’t like:

The smell of drool

ROSS

My hair being wet

Frozen peas

Mingling

Those Converse shoes that are high-tops but more like boots (Ew.)

Receiving/responding to (most) email and (all) voicemail

When things end

Flying

Running

This mustache trend with all the mustache shit everywhere

Gendered insults for women (e.g. what a bitch)

When my brothers send a thousand texts about sports when I’m trying to take a nap
When people say boring, obvious things and I have to act interested

nothing from me today

I've got a few things going on in this moment that I'm genuinely, tentatively excited about (and holy hell does it feel good to be excited about something, anything), and I'm too excited to write about them.  Also, I'm not in the habit of considering blog post topics as I go about my day like I used to be.

So this instead:

a litany for survival :: audre lorde 

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours: 

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive. 

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid 

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

And for good measure, this.  (Because holy hurt-my-stomach beautiful):

when you have forgotten Sunday: the love storyGwendolyn Brooks 

-- And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday,
And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday --
When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed,
Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon
Looking off down the long-street
To nowhere,
Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation
And nothing-I-have-to-do and I'm-happy-why?
And if-Monday-never-had-to-come --
When you have forgotten that, I say,
And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,
And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;
And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner,
That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner
To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles
Or chicken and rice
And salad and rye bread and tea
And chocolate chip cookies --
I say, when you have forgotten that,
When you have forgotten my little presentiment
That the war would be over before they got to you;
And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed,
And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end
Bright bedclothes,
Then gently folded into each other --
When you have, I say, forgotten all that,
Then you may tell,
Then I may believe
You have forgotten me well.

delightful

I really can't imagine a better afternoon than the one I'm having, curled up in the armchair by the window, thinking about maybe making some French onion soup for lunch, and reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. I love this book. When I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, it took me about a month. I liked it a lot, but I could only get into it for short amounts of time. I think that there's something intimidating about Marquez's super-long chapters. But I started this book Friday and I only have forty pages left.

I mean, there's something absolutely compelling about a passage like this, in which the perpetually-constipated protagonist shits his pants because he's so surprised by the sudden responsiveness of the object of his fifty-plus years' unrequited love:

Florentino Ariza thanked her, bid an urgent farewell with his hat, and left without tasting the coffee. She stood in the middle of the drawing room, puzzled, not understanding what had just happened, until the sound of his automobile's backfiring faded at the end of the street. Then Florentino Ariza shifted into a less painful position in the back seat, closed his eyes, relaxed his muscles, and surrendered to the will of his body. It was like being reborn. The driver, who after so many years in his service was no longer surprised at anything, remained impassive. But when he opened the door for him in front of his house, he said:
"Be careful, Don Floro, that looks like cholera.

I really lead a charmed life.