I sleep very deeply and rarely experience my dreams, but I had a dream just before I awoke today that I went to a music festival in England to do interviews for my show. I met the guest in a pub, along with another journalist. I didn’t have an adapter for my recorder because I’d forgotten about the electricity difference. I’d also forgotten to do any research and I wasn’t even sure of the name of the guest. His manager was with him and was disappointed to learn that the show wasn’t going to be streaming live on Facebook, which I don’t think is even a real thing. And there was a British journalist there and she said she’d also be asking questions during the interview. Right before that scene was a scene in a hotel where my roommates were two douchebros. Oh, and I spent the entire scene in the pub endlessly unwrapping mic and power cables.
I’ve never had stage fright. I’ve played music and spoken in front of thousands of people, and never once had a single butterfly in my stomach. Being on stage has always just been something that felt natural to me. It felt like where I belonged.
Except for one time.
About 10 or so years ago, I did a few minutes of stand-up comedy at a club in Rochester, NY. It was at an open mic, so the room was full of other wannabe comedians, which is not a particularly good way to put a crowd together. Everyone is nervous and competitive, which keeps the laughter at a minimum.
In any case, those five minutes on stage were the toughest five minutes I ever spent in front of people. Unlike with music or general public speaking, the feedback loop for stand-up can be measured in fractions of a second. You say something you intend to be funny, and people either laugh … or they don’t.
I got a few laughs. I didn’t bomb, but I didn’t kill, either. I did about average.
I think I went back once or twice. I’m not sure why I stopped. Over the years people have told me again and again to do stand-up, but I always say that being funny at parties or as the MC of a poetry open mic is not the same thing at all. Not even a little.
This Saturday, though, I’m giving it another shot. I’ll be doing 4-5 minutes of material at Celebration Hall, 2280 Commercial Blvd. in State College, at around 8:30. If it goes well, I’d like to keep at it. It’s always been a dream of mine, just one I shuffled to the bottom of the deck as life did what life does.
NOTE: As I get ready for this weekend, I’m finding a lot of inspiration in one of my comedy heroes, Bill Hicks, and his 12 principles of comedy.
Oh, and if you want to see comedy done right, watch Louis CK’s new special, which he released yesterday:
A couple weeks ago I decided to take a break from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I was feeling (am feeling) like those three places take up too much of my time and attention, leaving me somewhat disconnected from the actual place where I live and the real people who live here.
One positive effect of this decision: I’ve been posting a lot more on my blog, which I mostly used for poetry and the occasional essay or crowd-sourced list. I like posting more to the blog. It’s fun to create the content, and also nice to have complete control of it, rather than ceding that control to FB and Twitter and Instagram.
I set up this blog to automatically post to Twitter, so whenever I write something new, one tweet gets sent. And there are a small number of people who also subscribe via the RSS feed. That means a fairly consistent number of visitors every day. Not a huge number, but something. I never go on Twitter, I just let the blog do the work. I think same system might work for Facebook, too.
So I’m going to turn my account back on and then set up the blog to post to FB. I won’t go on Facebook itself, other than to occasionally set up local events. Facebook has been very useful for that, and I think it’s a mistake to give that up. But I’m not going to look at Facebook comments or read messages. I don’t have any social media apps on my phone, either. If you want to respond to what I post, you’ll need to do it here on the blog, or via email.
I’d like people to see what I create, and most of the people I know locally see my work through FB. The people I know (or “know”) in other places follow it on Twitter. It may turn out that once my FB account is activated, I’ll find that I can’t resist it. If so, I’ll turn it off again. But for now, I’m going to give this experiment a try.
A friend asked me to put together a reading list for her. I did, and in the process realized how few books I’ve read that were written by women. It’s shameful. I’ve been considering some sort of reading project for 2015. I think I just found it. Now I need your recommendations. Please note: I have read books by women and I’ve heard of women authors. I work in a bookstore, after all. What I’m looking for are specific book recommendations. Thanks!
Louisa Smith: Tana French writes terrific mystery novels. Good literature as well as good mysteries.
Irene Jaglowski: I loved Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat stories. (They’re YA novels) Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Short stories by Grace Paley. Also: Maria Semple’s Where’d you go Bernadette?. I couldn’t put it down. Hilarious. Semple was a writer for Arrested Development.
Tina Tatum: Barbara Kingsolver, Isabel Allende, Bobbie Ann Mason, Sheri Reynolds, Fannie Flagg, and Ellen Gilchrist are a few for starters. I will give you more suggestions later. Thanks for asking!
Louisa Smith: I would definitely second Kingsolver and Octavia Butler.
Scott Goulding: Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts
Will Yurman: ‘Come, Thou Tortoise’ by Jessica Grant is a book that has stuck with me
Jenn Weinzierl Binus: The Legacy of Luna
Nadje Noordhuis: The God of Small Things. White Teeth.
Jason Parker: The goldfinch was great. And my cousin Molly Antopol wrote a great book of short stories
Martin Porter: Amy Tan Toni Morrison Maya Angelou
Terri Hinte: Doris Lessing was hugely important to me in my 20s. Haven’t read “The Golden Notebook” in a very long time but that is a classic and IMO her masterpiece.
Terri Hinte: I LOVE Edna O’Brien: Country Girls, A Fanatic Heart. … Read just about everything by Jean Rhys.
Martin Porter: Flannery O’Connor is a personal favorite too
Jack Wright: “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver. I have worn out my copy. Too mainstream?
Carmen Staaf: If you haven’t read Mrs. Dalloway yet, that’s my recommendation! One of my favorite books. Also, My Antonia and The Professor’s House by Willa Cather.
Carmen Staaf: And A Journey With Elsa Cloud by Leila Hadley, a beautiful book. And this is not a novel, but I love If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland.
Camille-Yvette Welsch: A.S. Byatt (really anything) Louise Gluck The Wild Iris (life-changing), Jhumpa Lahiri Interpretor of Maladies, Fun Home Alison Bechdel (hey, she’s a local!), Sharon Olds, The Dead and The Living; and Stag’s Leap. I could really go on, but you have quite a list already.
Terri Hinte: Tillie Olsen “Tell Me a Riddle” (also “Silences”). Beryl Markham “West with the Night.”
Bradley M. Stone: Ursula K. Le Guin
Don Levy: Carmen Staaf, My Antonia is one of my favorite books. I loved Lahiri’s The Namesake. I love The Group by Mary Mc Carthy, and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
Vince Wilson: any book at all by Anne Lamott
Ron Mohring: What a great thread. I would add a small book, Author & Agent: letters between Eudora Welty and her agent. Also everything by Flannery O’Connor.
David Pulizzi: “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston. Also, if you’re looking for a great work of non-fiction, consider “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Also in the non-fiction realm, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” by Annie Dillard is a lovely book.
Terri Hinte: Zora Neale Hurston: yes!
Terri Hinte: No mention yet of Toni Morrison. “Song of Solomon” is the one for me.
Sylvia Barnard: Lots of British choices. AS Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Forster, Kate Moss, Sarah Dunant, Zadie Smith, and on and on forever.
Lejla Ovcina: Nervous conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwean author and filmmaker)
Jim Macnie: Toni Morrison: Sula.Beloved. Song of Solomon.
Jim Macnie: Jayne Anne Phillips Black Tickets Machine Dreams
Liva Judic: A good man is hard to find. Google the author and get the whole book of short stories! I think it’s Flannery O’Connor
Liz Ball: May not interest you, but A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass is a short coming-of-age story about a girl with synesthesia. Also, the Outlander series about to be turned into a starz show is apparently pretty good and is written by a woman, Diana Gabaldon.
Eric Ian Farmer: I enjoyed reading this thread. I second If You Want to Write (B. Ueland) and the coming of age story Nervous Conditions (T. Dangarembga). Also, if you’re interested in recent Native American history, two that I like are Lakota Woman (Mary Crow Dog) and All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Winona LaDuke). Both nonfiction. Oh, I also like Where We Once Belonged (S. Figiel), a coming of age story of a girl in Samoa.
MsLaurie Pepper: I second Terri Hinte. Song of Solomon is Morrison’s masterpiece. Anything by Eudora Welty, &, light & delightful, The Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell, and all her grisly books written as Barbara Vine. Oh, Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver! These are all books I’ve read more than once. Jerusalem the Golden by Margaret Drabble & To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
MsLaurie Pepper: PS Thanks for this post! One more, Reading Lolita in Tehran! Non fiction.
Terri Hinte: Jeanette Winterson “Written on the Body.”
MsLaurie Pepper: The Guns of August Barbara Tuchman
Robin Yukiko: Jane Eyre is one of my favorites but you’ve probably already read it.
Carly Zimmerman: Looks like these have been mentioned, but I will second them: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Also, if you just want to laugh, the memoir Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson made me laugh out loud. Oooh and Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle. Oh, and I know it’s become trite somehow, but Eat, Pray, Love is a great one. Oooooh and The History of Love by Nicole Krauss (she’s married to Jonathan Safran Foer – what I wouldn’t give to sit down to dinner in that house). Ok, I’ll stop here.
Jasmine Lovell-Smith: From New Zealand authors, I recommend ‘The Bone People’ by Keri Hulme. You could also check out Eleanor Catton’s ‘The Luminaries’ which won the booker prize in 2013, though I haven’t read it yet, and/or her first novel ‘the rehearsal,’ which I did read and really enjoyed.
MsLaurie Pepper: Wait! Jason. What about Why I Stuck with a Junkie Jazzman? By Laurie Pepper?
Matthew Silberman: “Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo” by Ntozake Shange
Gregg-Lion Hands Symons: Laurie: You should see the film of Wise Blood by ‘Jhon’ Huston — it was financed by the friends and family of O’Connor who worked with Huston to create an adaptation that was not only a great underrated movie, in my opinion, but one that makes me think of the author when i watch it: (criterion collection version with interviews with friends of family of Flannery O’Conner, Huston, the actors, etc.)
Gregg-Lion Hands Symons: Carson McCullers “Reflection in a Golden Eye”, Katherine Dunn “Geek Love”, All of the first 4 or 5 Barbara Kingsolver novels/comps, Dorothy Allison “Bastard Out of Carolina”, Ursula Hegi “Stones in the River”, Miranda July “No One Belongs here More Than You”, …also, Harriet Lerner “The Dance of Anger” (nonfiction), PLUS the entire gender studies section of Websters is full of great woman non-fiction authors …..
Chris Kelsey: Candace Millard’s “River of Doubt” (about Teddy Roosevelt’s Amazon misadventure) and “Destiny of the Republic” (about the assassination of James Garfield) are two excellent works of popular history.
For years I’ve struggled with what it is I’m supposed to be doing during my time here on Earth. I’ve talked in previous posts about many of the things I’ve done: union and community organizing, radio and podcasting, raising my kids. I’ve also talked about things I’d like to do, chief among them some kind of religious position, like being an interfaith chaplain or a minister-without-the-supernatural, which isn’t a real title in any church I’ve heard of.
Over the years, I’ve had conversations with a few important people in my life, particularly my friend Mike Roberts, about the idea of vocation or calling – the concept of a core quality or need that runs like a thread through life. For example, I initially thought mine was communicating with people. That seemed to make sense in the context of my various jobs, from organizing to media to music. I figured my main purpose was to talk to people in one way or another, usually to bring them together for some shared goal.
Several years ago, though, someone said a single sentence to me that completely changed my view of my vocation, and helped me clarify what I want to spend my life doing. I don’t mean that this person pointed to a specific job. Rather, he illuminated what my future needs to contain.
The person in question in John Holt. He’s a Methodist minister on Cape Cod. When I knew him, he was a Methodist minister in Canandaigua, NY. He was famous in our church for the crazy things he’d do – riding a bike down the center aisle of the sanctuary with a rubber chicken in the basket, for example. He’d left the steel industry and gone to divinity school, heeding his own calling. Then he dropped out of the ministry and went into non-profit administration, before deciding that a church was where he needed to be again. By coincidence, his church was very close to the town on Cape Cod where my parents briefly lived. So when I visited them, I asked them to invite John over, because he seemed like someone I needed to talk to.
At the time I was trying yet again to decide what to do with my life, and whether I should try to finish my undergrad degree so I could go to divinity school, either at a traditional university or somewhere like the Buddhist university Naropa in Colorado. I told John about my difficulties figuring out my purpose, and that’s when he dropped the bombshell:
“I’ve always thought, ever since I knew you as a teenager, that you need a job where you get paid to love people.”
(cue dramatic music)
Just like that, in that one moment, so much about my life became clear.
Now, as any of you who’ve followed my exploits over the past few years will know, that realization hasn’t led to a clear path. I’ve bounced around the country a lot since I had that conversation, and I’ve had quite a few jobs.
I know, though, that as I work out my life in the coming years, my main focus is on loving people, and on helping to build intentional communities where people feel safe to love and support one another. I’ll probably never lose my attachment to doing that in a religious setting, though at this point, given both my atheism and my lack of an undergraduate degree, I probably won’t do that formally. I could be wrong, but I just don’t see myself finishing my degree and then going to grad school, especially given my intention to stay here in central Pennsylvania till my kids graduate from high school in 10 years.
Instead, I’m trying as hard as I can to create intentional communities, whether that means the poetry series I started here, or the store where I now work (which is more a cultural hub and meeting place than just a store), or among my family and friends. As I look back on the 23 years since I graduated from high school, it seems clear that’s been a theme running through all that time.
I still hope to do things that are even closer to that core vocation, and I think I will. In the meantime, I’m content to always ask myself how what I’m doing is contributing to the goal of loving people and helping them love themselves and one another. I mess up a lot, like anyone, but I feel that if I can keep returning to this essential concept, I can stay on a path that will result in a life well lived.
I asked folks on Facebook and Twitter to tell me three new things they’re into. I took the idea from Danny Barnes. Here’s what they said.
Julie White: The show Scandal, Dharma yoga, the 7 minute workout.
Brad Brickley: The Flash t.v.show, G.R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice books, my health…again.
Robin Yukiko: 1. D&D 2. Coconut oil (cooking with/eating it and using it on my crazy hair 3. DIY shows and fantasizing about having a house I can fix up
Ren Ostrofsky: Arson, vigilante justice, and building strong interpersonal relationships
Daryl Shawn: The last tomatoes of the year, rye flour, Yob’s “Clearing the Path to Ascend”.
Jenn Weinzierl Binus: tea, knitting socks, teaching Josef to sew.
Jason Parker: Roasted cauliflower, Treme and walking in the rain
Tim Niland: King Crimson, Thich Nhat H?nh, New York Giants
Carter DeShazo: Sia’s Chandelier (song), Tazo Zen tea, and some new organic dog food for my Ellie
Sally Gustavson: Fires in the fireplace, Dr. Frank Semi-dry Reisling, and crockpot dinners
Caitlin Wynn Destiny: (video game), 90s indie and emo, and The Following (tv show).
Jack Wright: Latin bugaloo music movement, Roberto Roena, and New Orleans brass bands.
Martin Porter: I only eat various varieties of chicken and broccoli as per instructions from a nutritionist. I play Street Fighter 4 competitively. Brahms.
Christopher Gordon Forbes: Experimental metal…Henry Threadgills later work…n acrylic retarder gel….makes acrylic blend like oil paint.
Danny Barnes: homeboy sandman, mndsgn, and delayed gratification magazine.
Camille-Yvette Welsch: radar poetry magazine, Paper Doll Fetus (book of poems), throwing shit out. Does the last one count?
Hilary Gardner: Nyquil, Kleenex, cooking shows.
Betsy Hill Saueressig: Cough syrup, my Nebulizer in bed, and ibuprofen.
Jim Colbert: Cubism, songs about artists (this morning we listened to “Cezanne” by 5 Chinese Brothers, Stabil Ethanol gas treatment.
David Gibson: Commodore 64, cordless telephones, Friendster
Chris Hults: 1)Spanish pop music (Mana) 2)Augusto Boal 3)”The Diviners” by Jim Leonard, Jr. because I’m directing it next semester.
Chuck Ingersoll: 1. Champian Fulton (I didn’t know that, at times, she is an adventurous, female Mark Murphy. And that’s not sexist. It’s laudatory.) 2. http://blackjazzradio.com/bjradio.html It’s all dashiki jazz all the time. Great playlists. 3. Stitcher. Did not realize how functional, friendly, and handy it is until I got it on the Chromebook.
Bill Thompson: 1)Hats-Its getting cold 2)Raking-There’s a shit ton of leaves 3) Jackets-See 1)
Laura Waldhier: Mass Effect (video game), Unwritten (comic book), and The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (book)
Ross Hammond: IPA, Robbie Basho, vests
Irene Jaglowski: I second “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up”, also, Emily Wells and cartwheels.
Singer/songwriter Robin Yukiko also asked her friends this question. Here’s what they said:
Kori Beyer: Cooking with pumpkin, ed sheeran (don’t judge), push ups.
Daniel Feit: Doctor Who, Desert Golfing (smartphone game), “Shia LaBoeuf” by Rob Cantor
Ben Bausher: San Fermin (the band), figuring out how to cook the rest of the cabbage from my CSA in a way that everyone will eat, and battlestar galactica.
Joanna Bridge: Books by Jill Shalvis, NCIS: New Orleans, how cosmic filaments affect star formation histories in galaxies.
Tosha Crow: American Horror Story, Artist Trading Cards, and my current book, “Summer of Night,” by Dan Simmons.
Jason Crane: XTC, Lonesome Dove, the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert
Dana Barattin: making pies, hibiscus tea, and personality disorders (i work with severe mental illness, and i feel like this group is very neglected and misrepresented!)
Marshall Biever: Four Year Strong (go down in history E.P. no shame.) Hanging out on the #4 and major 7th when soloing in Lydian, and mixed modality within a solo.
Jessica Henninger Crock: Pots, pirates, and striving for minimalism.
Christine Libutti: Amy Poehler’s book “Yes Please”, using coconut oil as make-up remover, and drinking hot cider before bed.
Keiko Takamura: Brendan Jordan (I am obsessed with this kid!), looking at #inktober drawings, Pentatonix (kinda guilty pleasure, but GAH they are so talented!)
Melissa Nilsson: Finally getting on the Parks & Rec train, the new podcast from This American Life, Serial (one story tod over many weeks), and pining for my Halloween yarn dreads. Haha, just kidding. XKCD dude’s book, What If.
Holly Chandler: eating low sugar/ketogenic, snow queens and wintry folklore, fragrances (candles and oils and the like) that smell like cedar, pine or the woods in general
Alicia Parker: 1. YA post apocalyptic fiction 2. Fancy picnics in hikes and 3. Going to bed early
Earlier this year I ended a relationship that I never should have been in; it was a mistake and I am fully responsible for my part in it. I tried to end it as cleanly as possible, under the circumstances. Unfortunately, the aftermath of this relationship has now greatly impacted my life, because my former lover has become my stalker.
I’ve never had any experience with being stalked until this year. It’s been a revelation — the amount of psychological harm that can be done by a person who just constantly shows up is more than I’d imagined.
In my case, my stalker is constantly at my job, where I’m the store manager. I work in a private business, but it’s a community gathering space. My stalker is there most days. She sits and watches me while I work. I actually rearranged some of the furniture to make that harder for her to do. But it still happens. And when she talks to people, she usually does it so she can watch me at the same time. She leaves notes for purchases at the counter, and this past week even came up and spoke to me.
My stalker has also befriended several of my employees, some of whom no longer speak to me as a result. She’s slowly made her way through the staff, telling stories about me and becoming part of their social lives. Now many of my employees know about our relationship without my ever having told them. And of course they know only one side of the story.
The combination of her constant presence and her connections with my employees has turned my job from one of my favorite things into a place where I often feel hunted and uncomfortable. I’ve started having panic attacks when she shows up, and I often have to leave the building to take a walk around the block and get myself under control.
I also have to be very careful about the people I’m seen speaking to at work when she’s there, because I’m afraid for them. She’s already begun following and investigating my friends on social media, according to their own accounts. I’ve even seen her watching me on the street when I’m with friends, passing by the same spot multiple times to keep tabs on me.
In this age of social media, we’re all more vulnerable to stalking than ever. My stalker’s Twitter feed, I discovered tonight, contains very little other than comments about me and conversations with the people I know on social media. I didn’t realize this until someone pointed it out. It’s scary to watch my stalker interact with the people I know online, none of whom know about her relationship to me.
Nobody deserves this. Yes, we had a relationship we shouldn’t have had. But that doesn’t mean my life has to now be derailed by this one mentally unbalanced person. I do my best to ignore it, but I live in a small town and I work in an even smaller social community inside that small town. I know I’ve now been demonized in the eyes of some of the people of this community, and I don’t think that’s merited by my behavior. It’s much harder to deal with than I would have thought. I’m working on it, both legally and through mental health resources.
I’m a complete nonbeliever in the supernatural. Recently I tried a couple I Ching readings and today a friend did a tarot reading. I tried them not because I feel as though some force in the universe is speaking to me, but as a way to push my thoughts outside their normal patterns. Both experiences reminded me of setting up rules for a poem. Part of the fun of writing a sonnet or a villanelle is avoiding your normal writing patterns by imposing a new structure. In the case of both the I Ching reading and the tarot reading, I found it fun and even instructive to focus on the particular topics called up in the readings. I wouldn’t make major life decisions based on a coin toss or a random series of cards, but I’d certainly try either method to impose a new set of rules on my thought patterns.
Illustration by ee cummings Sex is a good, healthy, fun thing.
Talking about sex is a good, healthy, fun, important thing.
It took me most of my adult life to realize those two things. I grew up in a house where we didn’t talk about sex at all, and where the one conversation my parents and I ever had about it was very negative. I’m not blaming them. Neither had been given any tools to address the subject, so they didn’t. Unfortunately, the combination of their silence and my youthful Christian upbringing meant that I was terrified of sex at the same time I was hugely attracted to it. As a result, it took me till my mid-30s to start developing a healthy and real attitude about my sexuality and my needs.
(We also stigmatize masturbation. God forbid anyone should explore their own body and figure out what makes it tick. And if you’re not supposed to have sex until you’re married, and you’re not supposed to masturbate, what are you supposed to do?)
Part of the problem is that our hypersexualized culture is actually very limited in what it considers “normal sex.” In the words of George Carlin, we’re mostly given the image of “good, old-fashioned, man-on-top, get-it-over-with-quick” sex, or various kinds of porn. And while it’s certainly possible to find positive images of sex in porn, that spectrum leaves most of us without a way to navigate our own desires, or any language with which to figure out what we, or our partners, need. If the only time you see the kind of sex you want to have is when you’re sneakily watching it in a darkened room with the sound turned down or headphones on, how are you ever going to be able to find the kind of sex life that will make you happy?
Another key point is that different people have different sex drives. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a lot of sex, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting some sex sometimes, and there’s nothing wrong with rarely, if ever, wanting sex. Unfortunately, we don’t have models for differing sex drives. If you’re a straight man, you’re supposed to want to fuck everything that moves, all the time. If you’re a straight woman and you feel that way, you’re a slut. If you don’t really need sex to be happy and fulfilled, people think there’s something wrong with you or that you’ve had a bad experience. (If you’re gay, in many parts of the US, an open conversation about sex is often off the table entirely.) But without an understanding of the varying levels of desire for sex, people end up paired with partners whose sex drives don’t match theirs at all, which then becomes a source of tension in the relationship.
I was very lucky in my late 30s to meet someone with a very healthy body image and a very healthy approach to sex and gratification and communication. That opened up an entire world for me that I was starting to think didn’t exist. But it shouldn’t have taken that long. If we have healthy conversations with our kids, and create public spaces for honest conversations with one another and in our society as a whole, we can eliminate much of the stigma and shame and fear that goes hand-in-hand with sex in our Puritan country. I think this will lead not only to better sex, but to more appreciation and respect for one another as human beings. We live in a horrifying anti-woman society, and I think part of the problem is our lack of open discussion about human sexuality. A condom and a banana in health class aren’t enough. We need to talk about respecting one another and seeing each other as humans, not as desire receptacles. Our conversations need to stop being about the birds and the bees and start involving real talk about how people actually are.
I’m not pretending that this is groundbreaking, original writing. It’s not. Others have said all this before me or more will follow after. I’m writing this stuff because I wish I’d read something like this years ago, and maybe somebody will benefit from reading this now.
I recommend the article above about how we see poor people. It made me a little tight in the chest because it describes the way I live. I don’t talk much about my finances, but at this exact moment I have negative $41 in the bank and, with any luck, enough food to get me to payday, one week away.
In 2012 I turned my homelessness into the Jazz Or Bust tour, which allowed me to sleep on the couches of friends and strangers for six months. Without that tour, I don’t know where I would have lived. I haven’t had health insurance in years, and have only been to a doctor (out of pocket) to renew the anti-depression medication I take, which of course I pay full price for each month. All kinds of people fall into poverty, for all kinds of reasons. And often there’s no more belt tightening that can be done, and no family safety net to fall back on.
I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m figuring my way out and I’m doing OK. I’m just letting you know that you know a poor person. And there are, of course, people with even less than I have, both materially and in terms of privilege. (Thanks to Gina Marie Thompson for sharing this article with me.)
Yesterday I got a raise and I left work feeling very annoyed. One thing I’ve been working on a lot in my Buddhist practice is trying to both isolate the part of the body where the feeling resides and also to think about what made the feeling arise in the first place.
Three things bothered me about my raise.
The first was the meeting in which it happened. I make $10 an hour with no benefits, because I can’t afford our benefits at $10 an hour. I asked for $12 and got $11. In the meeting, my two bosses were really pulling out all the clichéd stops to try to devalue my work as much as possible, even while giving me more money. I finally stopped them and reminded them both that I’ve negotiated union contracts with multinational companies, and that the meeting we were in didn’t need to happen the way it was happening. I also pushed back on their devaluing statements. Although I was proud of my stance in the meeting, I still disliked the general feeling of conflict, and also the renewed realization that I work in a nonunion job for people who don’t care about their employees.
The second issue was a negative, but it led to a positive. I was embarrassed to be having a conversation in which I needed to justify to someone why I should make more than 133% above the Pennsylvania poverty line. I’m where I am because of the choices I’ve made and I know that. But it’s 2014 and EVERYBODY is worth more than $10 or $11 or $12 an hour. To be sitting there in my white shirt with my employer’s name on the left pocket asking for $80 more a week before taxes was humiliating. Again, not because I’m above it, but because everyone is. However, it led to this commitment: This is the last of these conversations I will ever have. I already had the goal of becoming a full-time freelancer by the end of 2014, and this meeting renewed my commitment to never justifying my worth for a low-paying job again.
The final issue was more personal. In the meeting, it came out that something I’d told a co-worker in confidence had made it to our boss. However, the thing I’d told her – that I was uncomfortable taking on her duties (she has a broken arm and needs to farm out paperwork) while making poverty wages – had put her in a difficult position, so I mostly felt bad about that. I apologized to her this morning.
So much is bound up in our working lives. I’m going to do everything I can to be the person who controls that part of my life.
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The photo at the top of this post is of a note I received from my boss this afternoon (about 8 hours after writing this post) because I unclogged the men’s room toilet.
It was pointed out to me this morning by someone I like and trust that I make many complaint-jokes about my job. So let me say this: My life is OK. I’m quickly rebuilding my relationship with my sons. I have friends in State College. I’m slowly building up a freelance career so I can work for myself. I date people. I have a nice apartment with two cats. I’m very grateful for all of that. Truly.
Also, I will continue to make darkly comic jokes about things in my life. I’m a receptionist at a car dealership making $15K a year with no benefits and that is hilarious in the way finally getting to fly on an airplane for the first time only to have it crash midway through the flight is hilarious. And yes, I’m here because of the decisions I made and I’m doing my best to make better ones. But for now, I need to keep making jokes because they help me stay sane. And I make them to all of you because you’re fabulous. Love you all. Need a Buick? Want to hear me answer the phone? 814-867-4444
I’m a complete nonbeliever in the supernatural. Recently I tried a couple I Ching readings and today a friend did a tarot reading. I tried them not because I feel as though some force in the universe is speaking to me, but as a way to push my thoughts outside their normal patterns. Both experiences reminded me of setting up rules for a poem. Part of the fun of writing a sonnet or a villanelle is avoiding your normal writing patterns by imposing a new structure. In the case of both the I Ching reading and the tarot reading, I found it fun and even instructive to focus on the particular topics called up in the readings. I wouldn’t make major life decisions based on a coin toss or a random series of cards, but I’d certainly try either method to impose a new set of rules on my thought patterns.
