Tag: required reading

Saw a great slide recently, “Privilege: The human version of “works on my machine”.”


Learning by Sarawut Intarob on 500px.com
Learning, by Sarawut Intarob

The American elections continue, with reactionaries on the left and right, worse on the right. Everyone has fallen on the right, except for Trump, who runs on a campaign of divisiveness and scapegoating. The educated, the ones with options, don’t seem to understand why he’s still around, still a force. The language he uses in “debates” consistently register at the fourth grade level, the “solutions” he offers are the equivalent of trying to fix a broken garburator by hitting it with a hammer. How can this man, who seems like a parody of himself, like a satirical rendition of a concept too awful to look straight in the face, be relevant? But that seems the crux of it; options. It’s easy, when you have them, to be blind to the desperation of those who don’t.

You can convince yourself anything is fine if you don’t think you have any other options.

And America’s narrative of money and power? It’s fading, and failing, and sad. Even the tech bubble seems to be slowly deflating. Meanwhile, headlines are painting a larger, bleaker picture. “World’s carbon dioxide concentration teetering on the point of no return; future in which global concentration of CO2 is permanently above 400 parts per million looms.”

Yet this is the same world in which Google’s AI is writing post-modern poetry, there is less crime than ever known, and extraordinary art is being created everywhere people go. The world which provided the above photo, which I find tirelessly inspiring. It displays a glimpse of the world I want, a mix of contrasts, varied and rich in experience, with education and tools for all and everyone, no matter their circumstances. Education, tools, and options.

So, wild ones, when you try to talk with those who hold opposing viewpoints, especially those who accept the scapegoat as truth, maybe point them over here: It’s Okay To Be Gray, by GlitchedPuppet and Siderea’s three part explanation and take-down of what’s going on with Trump’s campaign, which I consider essential and file unequivocally under REQUIRED READING – The Two Moral Modes: Part One, The Two Moral Modes: Part Two, The Two Moral Modes: Part Three.

Andrew Solomon: Depression, the secret we share.

“The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.”

Andrew Solomon is a poetic, eloquent writer on politics, culture and psychology. Does anyone have his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression? I would very much like to read a copy. It seems like it would help.

Let’s Throw A Riot (Because They’re Romantic)

It seems a number of us have all independently decided that This Is The Year We Bring Blogging Back, (More Specifically Livejournal). And I could not approve more.

I’m not sure why other people are trickling back into the fold, but for me my recent trip was a stunning reminder of what we had all built here. Just about everything positive in my life is somehow built on the foundation we created. My happiness is due to you and this place and what we made. It goes way back; I wouldn’t have found this apartment, wouldn’t have known about the concert I went to when I met my flatmate David, wouldn’t have connected so deeply with so many people. I wouldn’t have been able to make it to California if it weren’t for Jedidiah, who I met through Karen, who I met here nearly a decade ago, but only met face to face last year. I wouldn’t have had the chops to write about my godmother‘s house in Santa Fe, I wouldn’t have had such fantastic company in San Francisco, trying new things and feeling loved and inspired, I wouldn’t have felt so at welcome in Seattle or know how to deal with my people there, I wouldn’t have felt so safe running away with a complete stranger to Napa Valley. This was my very first community, the place where I started to begin.

Our network spread across the entire world, an empire upon which the sun could not set. Tel Aviv, Madison, New York, London, Santiago, these are all homes to people that have shaped me, many of whom I have never met, but carry always in my thoughts. (There’s a woman I know through Livejournal that I haven’t heard from in five years, but every year on her birthday I post to her last entry, letting her know that I still love her and probably always will.) And I want that back. I want all of you back.

I want myself back.

Somewhere in the mire of crappy relationships and scraping to get by in one of the most expensive cities in the world, I lost myself. I withered and I burned out. I was isolated and torn down and I let the bastards win. Radio silence took over. So this year is the year I push back, the year I clamber out of the rubble and get back into business. I’m going to write, I’m going to take pictures, and I’m going to badger you to do the same. Be my pen-pal, be my friend. I’m going to demand that you share and want you to demand it from me in return. I want a life worth fighting for again.

-::-

So who am I, anyways? Given that my audience has grown considerably smaller than the thousand-plus regulars who used to read my journal, but spread to more people that I’ve actually met, it’s probably time for an update. Another member of the Great Coincidental LJ Revival posted a massive introduction and I’m going to shamelessly swipe it because she used to write speeches for Jack Layton and who am I to paraphrase greatness? So here you are, a paragraph by Audra, “I was thinking that I should do a little intro, for all of the new folks. And then I realized that probably a lot of the LJ friends I’ve had for a decade could also benefit from an update about my life now. It’s easy, especially if you are connected by Facebook, to feel like everyone knows what is up with you always. I know that’s not actually how it works, though. More than once I’ll see someone post about a new baby or something, and not have even known they are pregnant. Facebook does a lousy job of helping us keep up with each other, really, since it only ever shows us content from people we have recently interacted with. Kind of defeating the whole keep-in-touch purpose of Facebook?”

So here I am: I’m a creative 31 year old Cascadian woman who writes, takes pictures, and is commonly understood as being “from the internet”, where my name is either Foxtongue or rarely, Dreampepper. I don’t know everybody, but I seem to live two degrees away from everybody, so if I don’t know you, it’s highly likely I already know your friends. (No, it’s not creepy, it’s hilarious. Just accept it, it hurts less when you don’t struggle.) I cohabitate with a vegetarian, contrarian flatmate, David, who is studying to be a primatologist; two black cats, Tanith and Tanaquil; and two ferrets, Selenium and Pepper. (Selenium is cuter, but Pepper makes up for it by being the biggest ferret I have ever seen). We share a two bedroom apartment in the Commercial Drive neighborhood of Vancouver, BC, that I have painted fuchsia, scarlet, orange, white, and gold, and we have filled with books, art, and houseplants. David likes clutter, I do not, but somehow it still works.

I used to have cool jobs, like “special effects pyrotechnician” and “co-founder of an after-hours nightclub”, but right now I’m on a more pedestrian path as the HR and Culture & Process person for a small IT support company based out of White Rock by the US/Canada border, so I spend my a lot of work-related time commuting as well as being paid to sift through applicants and write corporate documents like Standard Operating Procedures or Job Description Templates. Even so, I am lucky that my employers understand that culture creation is needful and doubly-so that I have nearly free rein to write whatever I believe will get the job done. This means I regularly put sentences like “Don’t take it personally, someone will probably have candy for you” in procedure manuals. (Given half an opening, I will also put goofy lines from the original Maxis SIM:Earth manual in, too, but I haven’t had the chance yet. SOON.1)

I also volunteer as a facilitator at CanSecWest, a security conference here in Vancouver that’s held annually every March. I love it there, I basically move into a hotel with a bunch of my favourite people and help make piles of awesome. There’s very little sleep, too many black t-shirts, but there’s also catering, a lot of love, and I’m always super happy to be part of it. (Even as it sometimes makes me seem paranoid to those outside of the security sector).

Aside from work, I have a couple of small projects, but nothing like I used to. It used to be that I was elbow deep in massive works all the time, but that went away when my interiority died, so now I only have a couple of small things: gamelan practice, a coding class, a language class, and my FB Portrait series, an endeavor to take a proper portrait of every single one of the 1000+ Facebook friends I’ve been lucky enough to collect. I would like to take more on, but there’s only so much creativity on tap right now and I have to be careful not to overwhelm what fuel I’ve managed to rekindle. I’m already three years behind on my photo processing! I’ve never even SEEN any of the pictures I’ve taken at Burning Man. Ever. Right this minute, I still have to deliver three weddings, two birthdays, a maternity shoot, about 30 Facebook portraits, and my Daily Photos from two years ago. (Which is why, if you say, “I want you to come up with my portrait!”, you’re going to get something boring, just like the last ten people who told me the exact same thing. Suck it up.)

Recently I’ve been lucky enough to travel a lot more than I have before: Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Madison, Montreal, Minneapolis, Mountain View, Napa, NYC, Oakland, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Seattle, and Vegas. Beautiful things and moments and people and discoveries at each, but it still doesn’t feel like enough. There’s so much of the world to explore, so many people to meet, so many things to do! In that, at least, I will always be greedy. I only get one chance at this and enough of it has been wasted. My goal is still to leave Vancouver for somewhere bigger, but in the meantime I plan to collect more lunatic adventures like, “that time I had that fling with the astronaut” or “that time I played pink slips for panties in a midnight drag race on the I5 and won” and use those to keep myself alive.

Anyhow, I want you to talk to me. Introduce yourselves, inform me or remind me who’s out there listening. I want this to be a safe place. This used to be our playground and I believe that together we can bring it back to life.

1. It’s been over 20 years, but I still use this joke. One day my network will bring me in contact with the person who wrote it and I will give them the biggest, best of hugs:

In general, SimEarthlings are as lazy as Earthlings. They never want
to work, and especially hate physical labour. Whenever there are heavy
objects to move, they argue over who has to do it.

“I don’t want to carry it–you carry it!”
“Not me–you carry it.”

And that’s how Eukaryotes evolved.

Of course, the usual solution is to hire a professional to do the work.
That’s what Prokaryotes do for a living.

Today’s Required Reading: HOW TO GET UNSTUCK

Dear Sugar, The Rumpus Advice Column #44: HOW YOU GET UNSTUCK:

[…]I hung up the phone feeling like my sternum had cracked open. Before I could even take a breath, in walked the girl whose mother’s boyfriend repeatedly almost drowned her with the garden hose in the back yard. She sat down in the chair near my desk where all the girls sat narrating their horrible stories and she told me another horrible story and I told her something different this time.

I told her it was not okay, that it was unacceptable, that it was illegal and that I would call and report this latest, horrible thing. But I did not tell her it would stop. I did not promise that anyone would intervene. I told her it would likely go on and she’d have to survive it. That she’d have to find a way within herself to not only escape the shit, but to transcend it, and if she wasn’t able to do that, then her whole life would be shit, forever and ever and ever. I told her that escaping the shit would be hard, but that if she wanted to not make her mother’s life her destiny, she had to be the one to make it happen. She had to do more than hold on. She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal. […]

I would have done a lot better had I this article when I was a child, growing up the way I did, isolated yet surrounded by violence, multiply assaulted by people I trusted, a victim marked with “survivor”, a word that sometimes is almost as awful as “deserve”. I hate almost everything about my life, that it’s a string of disasters, tragedies, and death, with very little to show, except that, in the words of one particularly useless ex, it’s amazing I didn’t turn out worse. (Thanks, O. You were awesome, the way I came home to find someone else in our bed the week I was moving in with you, the day I was fired because my boss had a husband that thought I was pretty. Right on. Way to go.) Even as an adult, my friends ditched when Heart of the World imploded, my family swings from religious right-wing alcoholics to unreliable leftists who think folk music will save the world, and 90% of my relationships have ended with being betrayed. My only defense is what good I can find, new art, new experiences, new people, new stories, collecting what I can to bolster my thin belief that there is better out there, that not everyone lives like I’ve lived, and to make sure they don’t, sacrificing my own life when required, because it has to be done, doesn’t it, and you’re not doing it, so I have to. It’s to the point where I’m known for it, (even though I hate that too, to be trusted but with no one to trust), a habit so deeply ingrained in my flesh it’s become my second skin, the thing that keeps the bitterness that flows through my blood from dissolving me completely, the acid in my heart from burning it altogether black. I am glad for this woman, for being able to articulate so clearly what I so desperately needed when I was a girl, what I still have to remind myself weekly is true, not that it will get better, it bloody well hasn’t and it damned well won’t, but that reaching is important, even when you’re alone, especially when you’re alone, even if you perpetually, perpetually fail.