tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65648749450187043812023-06-20T06:15:24.586-07:00There Are No Experts Up ThereTHERE ARE EXPERTS IN LITTLE THINGS, BUT THERE ARE NO EXPERTS IN BIG THINGS. There are experts in this fact and that fact, but there are no moral experts. It's important to remember that. All of us, no matter what we do, have the right to make moral decisions about the world. We must be undeterred by people who say "You don't know. You're not an expert. These people up there, they know." Everyone must be involved. There are no experts. -Howard Zinnrachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.comBlogger37125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-76848230382786719122010-08-21T09:50:00.000-07:002010-09-06T14:54:04.602-07:00Zeitgeist Nightmare Problem Hotline<div>Hello lost and scared liberal arts graduate!</div><div>Thank you for calling the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">ZNP</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Hotline</span>!</div><div>We are here to help you with those overwhelming problems</div><div>that you're gonna get through just fine</div><div>because everyone has problems like these.</div><div>We're so glad you called.</div><div><br /></div><div>Press 1 if you want to talk about bedbugs:</div><div>Press 1 again if you've got bites in groups of 2's or 3's, and you're itchy and flipping out.</div><div>Press 2 if you think you found a bedbug in your house and you're flipping out.</div><div>Press 3 if you're living in a chemical haze amidst piles of plastic bags, and you're flipping out.</div><div><br /></div><div>Press 2 if you have digestive problems:</div><div>Now, Press 1 if shitting is painful and you don't know what's wrong.</div><div>Press 2 if you have been Diagnosed With Irritable Bowel Syndrome, but you still feel like you have no idea what's wrong.</div><div>Press 3 if you had a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">colonoscopy</span> and it didn't reveal anything, and you're dejected because shitting still hurts and you don't know what's wrong.</div><div><br /></div><div>Press 3 for money and employment problems</div><div>1 for underemployment</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>#if you're running out of money</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>*if you're freaking out about living off your saving, trust, parents or bar mitzvah money</div><div>2 if you can't handle your job</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span># if you feel overqualified</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>* if your boss is a flake and/or jerk</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>0 if you are in the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">food service</span> industry and you want to get out.</div><div><br /></div><div>Press 4 if you need to talk about the recent NY times article about 20 somethings.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span># if your parents sent you this article</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>* if you were featured in a photograph in the article</div><div><br /></div><div>Press 5 if you're overwhelmed with guilt about the pettiness of your own problems, because you know you've got it so good.</div><div><br /></div><div>Press 6 for struggles about Relationships</div><div>1 for break ups</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span># for lingering feelings about long past break ups</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>* break ups in the works</div><div>2 for difficulties with transcendent, complicated friendships</div><div>3 for friendship stress related to cohabitation</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>0 if that stress has been <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">amplified</span> by bedbugs</div><div><br /></div><div>An operator will be with you shortly. In <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">lieu</span> of music, here are some things to remember, and to remind your friends:</div><div><br /></div><div>It's not your fault it hurts to take a shit.</div><div>it's the diet we've learned, </div><div>the anxiety we shoulder </div><div>and the after effects of the great drugs we are given when we are sick.</div><div> If you find it in yourself to mention you are in pain, you will quickly find friends and family with similar problems.</div><div> Try their advice, but do not become discouraged if relief does not come quickly.</div><div>Anxiety is likely part of the problem,- that's true</div><div>But this does not mean it's in your head, or your fault</div><div>The only way past that is actually to teach yourself not to worry. this takes time.</div><div>Eventually, you'll probably figure out how to make it better.</div><div>Your coping skills are as strong as you believe they can be.</div><div><br /></div><div><div>It is not your fault that your employment does not fill your dreams.</div><div>hold your head up, we're in a recession</div><div>and yes, we have been lied to all our lives</div><div>there is not space for everyone </div><div>or even everyone with an education like ours</div><div>to have the perfect job.</div><div><div><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Maintenance</span> work is work: there is honor in helping with homework and wiping down tables.</div><div>Divert the question 'what do you do?' by answering what you care about.</div><div>Do not let go of your dreams.</div><div>follow them gently,</div><div> with as much energy as you can muster, </div><div>but no guilt for not having more.</div><div>you've been taught a manic ambition, </div><div>turning that sustainable does not mean tuning it down.</div></div><div>now is the time you get to define success.</div><div>you have already made the decision to be an artist, and nothing will change that</div><div>even if you never make a dime off of it, or if no one ever hands you external validation.</div><div><br /></div><div>the nonprofits are unfortunately not gonna save the world. </div><div> you wouldn't be the savior even if one of them hired you for the perfect job. </div><div> The same system <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">that's</span> fucking you is fucking everyone, </div><div>and things are only going to get more complicated in your life time. </div><div>The only work you will ever do is making a life that mutually nourishes you and the world.</div><div><br /></div><div>Articulation is an act of resistance.</div><div>When you can, maintain space for the bigger problems beyond your every day.</div><div>If you can afford not to, do not cut off your family tree. </div><div>But if you have to do that to thrive, know that you are not alone and you can plant your own.</div><div>Any relationship you make impact on is a site of positive change in the world.</div><div><br /></div><div>Relational struggle is an inevitability and a place to learn.</div><div><div>All this theory you've had the privilege to absorb does make it complicated, </div><div>accept that your words are <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">muttled</span> in describing the paradigms for the relationships you seek.</div><div>you have too many friends from messy divorces to leap fast and easy for forever, that's true.</div><div>yes, you risk navel gazing, you risk delusions of infinite time</div><div>Modernity was chosen for you, in all its awkward permutations.</div><div>if you do not choose to leave it, you will make it better by your participation.</div><div><br /></div><div><div>And we did not brings those <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">indestructible little</span> fuckers in our houses, </div><div>they are everywhere and the city does not know what to do with them. </div><div>By dealing comprehensively with the problem, </div><div>you are helping support new <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">york's</span> effort to get bedbugs under control.</div><div>Do your part to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">de</span>-stigmatize by telling your parents and your friends, </div><div>but for fucks sake be cautious about them:</div><div>sleep in your bed so they don't burrow deeper in to the walls, </div><div>tell everyone you know to buy a mattress encasement, </div><div>and have faith that your relationships will survive all of this logistical stress.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>You <i>are</i> making the right decisions.</div><div>Use your powers of language to help yourself and your community believe this is so.</div><div><br /></div><div>When one of our associates was babysitting, </div><div>she came across a scenario that helps calm her down:</div><div>After a hurricane hit Sesame street, Gordon said to Big Bird,</div><div><i>you're right, Big Bird, it's not okay. But it will be okay.</i></div></div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-49605217770159180992010-08-05T10:31:00.000-07:002010-08-06T17:01:18.537-07:00optimism is in the formrepetitive art tasks means hours upon hours of radio<div>this petrifying world: interviews about corporate branding and chemicals and television and iraq and government lies.</div><div>it is dizzying, hands cutting cardboard, summaries of the scary world piped in through my laptop, bundle of heavy metals and plastic and sheild against loneliness, bundled and hauled and connecting me to friends and music and reading, when so many other objects I count on are otherwise occupied.</div><div><br /></div><div>Today I am listening to an interview with Emily Henochowicz,</div><div> an art student who lost her eye in a protest in Israel.</div><div>For the first time all week,</div><div>though she is more optimistic than the past few hours of radio garble,</div><div>and though there's a lot of personal shit that makes me feel so sad lately,</div><div>when she says 'my father came to Israel to help me in the hospital'</div><div>I immediately burst in to tear.</div><div><br /></div><div>Optimism is in the form:</div><div>Father, Family, Hospital, Interview, Drawing.</div><div>mostly content fails: the litany of all scales of bad things is a constant leeching of hope.</div><div>What remains to be beautiful is that we have modes to respond at all,</div><div>names for the things we use to keep us going.</div><div><br /></div><div>This phrase first occurs to me two weeks ago </div><div>when I am driving home late at night and listening to a rough cut of a friend's song.</div><div>I am distraught about entirely different things than the awful ones he is singing about</div><div>he recorded all the parts, some one at a time: 5 minutes of baseline. 3 of guitar.</div><div>It sounds lonely.</div><div>I feel calmed, but what about any of this could reasonably be described as comforting? </div><div>optimism is in the form: car ride, friendship, song.</div><div>makes me think about the most moving thing about my big art project, two years ago,</div><div>how it's unplanned beauty filled me with energy, when I had been a trodden wreck all year.</div><div>and I learned that I was hopeful because I would not be trying to make anything if I were not,</div><div>making is hopeful.</div><div><br /></div><div>sometimes it is so obvious:</div><div>I returned the other day from a week at my old summer camp,</div><div>try number 2 at making a meaningful environmental program there.</div><div>and though my attempt is much less than perfect, again</div><div>it is clear what is beautiful that this is happening at all.</div><div>that I am contributing to a place that built me up, </div><div>trying to make small change in a place where I have the privilege of agency</div><div>and that I am said yes to:</div><div>that young people are participating, that I am given permission, help, compensation, budget</div><div>summer camp. earth day. carnival. workshop: content is imperfect, but these vessels lift us up.</div><div>is trying itelf a form? an action, an institution?</div><div><br /></div><div>most things I struggle to make sense of, I justify with learning. Education as form.</div><div>optimism is in the form, and identifying this is a matter of perspective. form is always there.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-53142181622615841062010-07-12T17:47:00.000-07:002010-07-12T18:21:36.629-07:00conditioning airThe air conditioner as the example of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">interconnectivity</span> of everything.<div>Invented to cool and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">de</span>-humidify factories, they are a product of our love of work, our manufacturing roots.</div><div>Transitioned to consumer use use via the movie theater in the 20's, where they enabled the expansion of the movie theater season through the hot hot summer, where they enabled the invention of the summer blockbuster- which we all know is still an excuse to keep cool.</div><div>Brought in to domestic spaces in the 50's, air conditioning was a populist modern luxury. They made and continue to make structures that would otherwise be insufferably hot in to pleasant places to be, they enable design that does not consider its location.</div><div><br /></div><div>Air conditioning, unfortunately, makes the world warmer. I review the second law of thermodynamics: warmth moves to where it is cooler. To resist this phenomena requires a machine that uses energy, which at some point along the line produces heat. Air conditioners resist entropy, the smallest scale of equalizing working to blend the temperatures of the world. It is a mechanic force of making the world more complicated: indoors colder, outdoors warmer, we are <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">vacillating</span> through increasing extremes. </div><div><br /></div><div>Air conditioners are part of the one big iconic problem: they use massive amounts of electricity-generally <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">unsustainably</span> produced, and also usually require <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">chloroflourocarbons</span> to function, thus radiating this known ozone <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">depleter</span> into their air everywhere. </div><div><br /></div><div>cold inside today, hotter outside tomorrow. Air conditioners are:</div><div>a commonly held privilege that none of us should have to need</div><div>a totally unsustainable self-quarantine against danger and discomfort</div><div>a self-protection from the reality of heat</div><div>a buying yourself time away from the hot future and the hot masses. </div><div>a short term solution to a long term problem on a scale beyond what any of us can control. </div><div>an urban coping: totally necessary in spaces engineered not by the people who use them, an important public health tool in this hot hot summer. </div><div>an unavoidably unsustainable response to our increasing isolated disasters, but unfortunately <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">unsustainability</span> itself is an accelerating long disaster within in which all of these independent events can be situated. We respond to the benign disaster of a heat wave with contribution to a greater one.</div><div><br /></div><div>Should we suck it up and live with the heat? There's good reasons to say so: heat tolerance is a skill we are loosing, with all our cooled spaces. Cold air allows us year round access to gluttony that appetite-suppressing weather interrupts. Cold air soothes irritated throats, allergies, asthma, and thus masks our terrible air quality, while only contributing to the problem. But air conditioning allows us respite from these health conditions, which none of us volunteered for, and from the poor passive cooling of our urban and suburban spaces. It protects us against these fundamental discomforts, soothes us to the point of ability to continue functioning. Wildly, obscenely overused- but where do we draw the line? and whose job is it to draw?</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-39403980249755283222010-05-07T17:14:00.000-07:002010-07-08T12:54:56.266-07:00You Are Not a Gadget and Fears of Facebook<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><div><br /></div><div><br /></div> <br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal; ">Dogmatism is the first iteration of what, fermented tested and conjealed, is to become a robust belief. Here is a new one of mine:</span></span><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: normal; "></span></span><br /><div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre;"></span>If you are one of the 400 million people with a facebook account, and you've checked it this week, and you probably have then you're aware of their most recent manditory change. Facebook gave its participants an 'opportunity' to link whatever they wrote on their profiles under the interests, activities, places of work, education, 'fans of' sections to newly created pages for all of these schools, companies, bands, activities, objects, etc. What was not made explicit is that now facebook users can <i>only</i> list things in these sections of their profiles that already have pages. This is to say, Facebook has claimed the right to define within its own cyber universe what things do and do not qualify as interests/activities/schools/places of employment/things to be fans of.</div><div><br /></div><div>Facebook is always making changes- in fact, the self-definition of what facebook is for is basically all that facebook is about. Up until this lastround, it's always struck me as really, uh, whiny, to problematize what facebook is doing- because the whole set up is a trivial entity, a distraction from what's 'real'....and besides, it only affects people who made the very active decision to be on facebook. Being on facebook is just another thing I am complcit in yet don't particularly believe is a good social change, and so I should not complain.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span> I am reading You Are Not A Gadget, by Jaron Lanier, and it is helping me to clarify my beliefs about the internet, with the hope that this will help me make choices I do believe model and reflect more positive change than negative. In this emerging context, I am totally up for whining about Facebook. I find this latest round of changes extremely problematic, both symbolically and pragmatically.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>We haven't yet as a society fully interalized that <i>the internet is space, </i>subject to the same tensions and phenomena as physical land. This means that all the same fucked up stuff that goes on in physical space goes on here. The internet is an iteration of two architypal stories of physical space, both part myth and true in this and any other situation.</div><div><br /></div><div>1) New institutions are the work of idealists, and that shit always gets corrupted: </div><div>The internet was invented by a lot of hard working volunteers, in an incredible act of collaboration. These people were visionaries and idealists, just like the inventors of any new interpersonal entity (community, country, economic system, technology) that manages to take hold. These people built the internet on common socialist ideals, in which the de-centralization of media and communications technology would lead to a more even distribution of economic, cultural, and ideological power. Now, corporate globalization and democratic capitalism are raiding this internet- because that's unfortunately the forces that are at play in our world right now. The internet is increasingly controlled by affluent white men and the corporations they run, because our world is in a pattern of colonizing, the internet is new territory, and <i>that's what colonizers do to new territory</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>2)Technology is the progression of our ability to be violent. That's not news and not new:</div><div> The internet was invented by the army. It is not suprising, that an institution designed for violence was the site of development of something that is now so hugely pervase in endless ways unrelated to war; technology is by definition an offshoot of human aggression. The tools we label 'technology' is an outpouring of competitive, violence, greed, possessiveness, gluttony-the most fundamental things about ourselves that we will never be rid of. The internet is the latest round of the military industrial complex- our passions, creative output, social interactions, and sense of convenience gobbled up by technological progress like any other human need.</div><div><br /></div><div>Any internet version of a 'real world' activity exists in our collective memory as a supplement, but it isn't one anymore. E-mail is not a secondary version of mail...it's more like the other way around. We understand online maps as more real than paper ones- and in a way, they really are, since they are updated, who knows how often, without the It would be ridiculous to say that facebook is replacing friendship, that e-books will do away with paper books, that online shopping is replacing stores, or that internet dating is upending conventional courtship. But these things are profoundly affecting our perception of the institution of most practices in our lives: friendship, shopping, dating, consuming media, corresponding. An engineering change, like turning the 'interests' and 'likes' categories on a facebook profile from text boxes to in to hyperlinks picked from drop-down menus have a real effect in real space. Now the folks at facebook get to decide what an interest is, or what things can be liked.</div><div><br /></div><div>Seems like a pretty benign change; and of course yes, mostly it is. But it feels symbolically crucial to me. Facebook's decision to make interests in to hyperlinks seems based in the belief that unbias is possible, that of course they will work hard to make every possible interest in to a hyperlink. But there is no such thing as unbias, and so whoever's job it is to make and monitor these pages will bring their subtle bias, attempting to evenhandedly make a format for the self-proclaimed interests of 400 million people all over the planet, from the idiotic to the extremely charged.</div><div><br /></div><div>Where do these links go? to a newly created 'community page' that is mostly just a jazzed up version of the wikipedia entry for whatever the topic at hand is, plus a feed of posts anyone has made that relate to the topic. (I can't imagine how this would ever be pertinent to anyone) Thus, facebook is saying that espousing an interest in absolutely anything makes you part of a self-generating virtual community around that thing, whose definition of itself is self-generated through participation, according to the grand wikipedia concept of neutrality- which is that, if everyone invested enough in defining something works together to define it, their biases will cancel each other out.</div><div><br /></div><div>I struggle with articulating what the bias is of internet crowd-generated wisdom. For now, I've been calling it the 'sanitized bias', for it's leaning toward people who are uncritical of technology enough to care to work on wikipedia definitions.</div><div><br /></div><div>Most importantly, it is easy to forget that crowd-defined content (or what I'm learning is called 'cloud wisdom' in techier worlds) inhibits individual vision on a subject, and obscures whose greater structural vision is getting enacted. Collaboration is great, but ultimately it is the person designing the container for collaboration who has any substantive power. / By giving us all the power to generate content within certain formats, facebook and kind of the internet in general (like this blog!) give an illusion of democratization, while in fact consolidating power in to the hands of the container-makers.</div><div><br /></div><div>We don't get any say in the containers on the internet. I wonder lately what it must feel like to be an engineer or a programmer, whether you'd really have a sense of how profoundly you are affecting the experience of being alive on the crowded hot flat flattening planet. I do not know anyone who has the power to engineer such social changes, and I do not feel any systems in place that help these people reflect, or that let us have a say in technological change, which is to say social change. These people who get a say- they are from the same aristocracy that has always had control. this is not new. </div><div><br /></div><div>And so changes like how an 'interest' is defined and displayed on facebook is defined for all of us by the same lineage of affluence, on the same trajectory of imperialism. The internet is just the newest territory to stake claim in how those without the power, who are more and more of us, live their lives. This doesn't feel like a flattening economic world, this feels like new categories of persistent lack being carved out of the top of our economic ladder: creating intellectual poverty within the embarrassment of riches, reserving real agency for a smaller and smaller few, while the rest of us become subservient to our gadgets.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div></div></div></div>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-25822885838896099122010-04-07T16:37:00.000-07:002010-04-17T14:37:12.706-07:00Like a Toaster in a Bath<i><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><div><i><br /></i></div></span></div>When I want to work and my son wants to play, he will give very strong 'I am playing' signals in an attempt to pull me back into his game. All people relate to each other in this way, but most teachers are afraid to give 'I am playing' signals to their students. If they would, their work would become a constant pleasure. -<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Keith Johnstone</span></i><div><br /></div><div>This quote is is from <i>Impro</i>, a book about practicing and teaching improvised theater that I have read many times. I am returning to it again now, having just recently returned to improvafter a four year hiatus. My connection to improv is curious (I intentionally do not say funny), because of how much I struggle with humor. My sense of humor comes in and out over months and hours, in a way I don't feel I have much control over, but that obviously relates to what's going on in the rest of my life. And so I have started thinking a lot about my feelings about humor. There's a lot I haven't begun to articulate, but I'm writing to capture what I know right now.</div><div><br /></div><div><div>When messy situations used to come up at staff meetings, the principle of the school I was working at would use the phrase <i>with lightness. </i>He is an amazing man: serious, empathetic, articulate, self-aware...even of what an inflated ego he had. I felt a unspoken resonance with him, sharing the kind of self-importance and gravity that allows a person to see their own over-seriousness, but only be able to muster in response to them self a pensive, deliberate reminder that <i>it is possible to approach this situation with lightness</i>. </div><div><br /></div></div><div>I say all the time (jokingly I guess) that I have no sense of humor. It's not exactly true, so what do I really mean? At least these things:</div><div>When I don't understand jokes, I <i>like</i> when people explain them to me, and then I laugh at the explanation...even I have enough humor in me to recognize how strange that is. I don't enjoy banter. I'd pretty much always prefer people talk about something serious (and equate serious with interesting), so I'm often annoyed when people crack jokes. And most of all, I hate, <i>hate</i> being teased. even gently and lovingly, even when part of me knows its funny. I often feel like I have no natrual capacity for lightness.</div><div><br /></div><div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">I haven't found the impetus to make myself laugh, but the joke is in there somewhere, like a toaster in a bath. </span>-Samuel Lang Budin/Weird Chess</span></i></div><div>I had this quote stuck in my head the whole time I've been writing this post. Maybe I can rewrite and work it in in a more clever way....but it makes me chuckle about this seriousness in straining for lightness.</div><div><br /></div></div><div>But lightness isn't just funny. It also means ease. When some situations presented themselves a few weeks ago that I knew would be internally very hard for me, I lay in bed chanting to myself <i>with lightness. with lightness. with lightness!</i> I'd also say <i>relinquish, Rachel! relinquish! </i>(this is the other word I am infatuated with). But the words felt heavy, commands banging down on my gut, in action as if saying to myself <i>repress repress repress</i>. I didn't sleep very much.</div><div><br /></div><div>And there is definitely a relationship between lightness and relinquishing. I haven't put my finger on it yet, but what I know so far in words is this: Relinquishing is about experiences of non-mutuality, letting go of what we thought we wanted/needed in situations where we know we're not going to get it. Totally mutuality is impossible, and relinquishing is a necessary skill. Lightness is a coping within that, a way of allowing onesself to relinquish expectation without dissociating. When looking at the big picture isn't working, lightness is allowing yourself to look at the even more infinite <i>no</i> picture, relax and laugh.</div><div><br /></div><div>This makes me think about my parents, who think I am a comedic genius. There is a lot of commonality between us to play with...you know, since they raised me, but also a lot of non-mutuality in that relationship, inherent in the fact that I'm no longer their kid, living out their vision for me. But the terms of that relationship are relatively set, and so there is a lot of ease in it. As a comfortable coping for non-mutuality, my family is just about the only place where I am consistently experienced as funny.</div><div><br /></div><div>Teaching is a a messier space than family:a huge site of personal work, challenge, and growth. I read this quote of Johnstone's as saying that he believes teachers don't let themselves play with their students because they are afraid of enjoying their jobs. ...and this makes a lot of sense in the context of my job, lately. My coworkers don't particularly like their jobs, and the attitude is contagious. They talk about the children collectively as brats...at best, cute brats, and they are quick to yell at them. There is a lot that is unsolvable and outside of our control about how our after school program works, and it is definitely a frustrating job. But in the abstract, I <i>love</i> my job, so I've been working on ways to actually feel satisfied in the moment. </div><div><br /></div><div>A lot of my job is supervising large groups of children in un-programmed time: hallways, snack time, recess, dismissal. These all happen in public places, where there are other adults watching how I take care of the kids- which is so stressful. The main mode adults relate to each other in seems to be to greet each other wearily, affirming our position as outside of whatever small ruckus is inevitably taking place within earshot of us. I feel pressure to relate to other teachers this way, and am totally sized up when I am the educator in charge of the group of kids who are making the noise. I try not to buy in to this small exaltation of child docility, but in some basic sense I still assess whether I've done my job well that day by how quietly my students can walk in a straight line down the hall. And so like my coworkers, I get comfortable barking orders. Which doesn't work. Lately, I've decided instead to try not to care if the kids are 'misbehaving'. I say to noisy clusters of first graders, <i>Hey look! some people here are standing in line! It looks like Alex is almost standing in line, except that he's facing the wrong direction, and he's 5 feet from the line, his backpack is still on the table, and his cheez-its are spilled all over the floor! </i>I can't claim this makes them get in line any faster than when I yell, but they don't get ready any more slowly either, and I finish the day feeling like I've been playing, rather than feeling like I've smothered the spirits of children. </div><div><br /></div><div>Johnstone says, if educators could learn to play with children rather than boss them around, they could love their jobs. And maybe it's even bigger: If we all could more mindfully access where we place our sobriety and lightness, and use lightness where we don't actually need to have control over the situation, we could be liberated from all kinds of energy-suck, we could feel good about what we do, and with the new buoyancy we could have energy to do better in the places in our lives where maintaining or taking control really are important. So for me right now this means, identifying more spaces for lightness.</div><div><br /></div><div>Enter improv. After a four year hiatus, some friends from an old troupe of mine started up rehearsing again...and it's just honestly amazing. This activity that was so petrifying and crucial to me when I started in high school. Cathartic, if not nearly as scary as it was when I was 14, I ask myself as i re-enter: why is this important and energizing to me? On the surface improv is about things I say I'm not interested in: being funny, and making stuff up (someday I'll write here about fictionality...).</div><div><br /></div><div> I fall back in to the same approach I had cultivated, which is to take improv seriously. I do not attempt in the least bit to be funny, stumbling on it like an accident, believing that any funny you work for is basically just dumb. I increasingly find myself playing out my politics- the other week I showed up as a protesting long time resident in a sequence about a fancy new bar in brooklyn. I like to play characters who clarify plots as they emerge, give serious feedback after practice, and I am visibly pissed when my troupe mates seem unfocused... for example, choosing to play out an extensive, illogical sequence about jacking off.</div><div><div><i><br /></i></div></div><div>In past improv troupes, this seriousness has made me feel outside of the main action of the group, and I know in other parts of my life my insistence on taking myself so seriously is a way I make myself feel distant. In this new improv group, I often feel self-conscious about acting this way, and I sense that at least one other troupe member is really not pleased with the way I am/am choosing to be. </div><div><br /></div><div>Allowing space to unapologetically embrace what I'm just naturally prone to be like, I also find myself thinking about how else I could behave in improv, at work, and elsewhere. What if I didn't feel that kind of detached, would it be possible? I know this gravity is what made me start thinking of myself as an educator, and yet in my work as a teacher find myself feeling I'd be better if I weren't quite so....teacherly. I rarely really know how to play with my students. I am aware this places me outside of my student's world: the seriousness with which I orchestrate the logistics of their afternoon is so far off base from the priorities in their world, a world that is mostly about fun. And all people were kids- the world of self-generated play is someplace we all crave. I think about how I relished seriousness as a child, how I felt alienated from most of my peers, even then, because of how playful they preferred to be, and I wonder lots about how we culturally define the job of Teacher that made me feel so strongly, for as long as I can remember, that this serious disposition made me especially qualified to shape young people. I do feel that there is a lot in the world that needs to be approached with more gravity...but that in handling the real discomfort that exists in almost any situation that involved people, didactic seriousness can only get you so far.</div><div><br /></div><div>And I feel a lot of gratitude too: for the fact that improv was a big part of my education, and now is something I can make for myself to continue learning. For this chosen livelihood that can function as the site at which to face my heavy self hood, for the joint opportunities to expand my relationship to lightness.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>expand my relationship to lightness. </i><i>Seriously, Rachel, is there a heavier way to possibly say that? What about if you said.... lighten up?</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><br /></div><div><i><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><div><i><br /></i></div></span></div></i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div><br /></div></div>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-42707020563026431452010-03-26T10:27:00.000-07:002010-03-30T14:53:45.561-07:00right now abstract<div>recent relevant language:</div><div><br /></div>awful/unhinged, unhinged<div>relinquish</div><div>energetic relinquish</div><div>from repression to relinquish. </div><div>gentle inner voice</div><div>access to nurturing work.</div><div>with lightness,</div><div>emoting//coping</div><div>aesthetic space, aesthetic distance</div><div>ravenous appetite for closeness</div><div>the constant revelatory trauma that other people are not ourselves</div><div>transgression, competition// transcedence, community</div><div><i>everyone</i> is a jerk.</div><div>kindness prevails</div><div>reckoning with convention</div><div>authentic following of relations</div><div>that exact affirmation</div><div>success is not not feeling deeply</div><div>the restorative powers of community </div><div>affirmation for safety(danger)//affirmation for building power</div><div>what does success look like?</div><div>the contemporary neutral everything is unfortunately not soil but plastic.</div><div>presence, body, words</div><div>when you put your mind to improvement, you are exactly not</div><div>finding the game, saying yes</div><div>How much compromise?</div><div>the bravery to leave// the openness to yeild.</div><div>getting to yes</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-44989067112197631232010-03-22T21:16:00.001-07:002010-03-22T21:29:12.402-07:00All of the ephemera I've gathered thus far, organized in labeled files<div><div><br /></div><div>Art Readings, Bard, Car, Cash, Compost, Education Readings, Envelope Skins, Family, Finances, Flash Monster, Flow Charts, Garden, Gift Certificates, Hand Made Paper, Health, Health Insurance, Housing, Job Stuff, Justice Readings, Language/Communication Readings, Legal Documents, Music, My Drawings, My Writing, Nice Letters, Other People's Drawings, Other People's Charts, Paint Chips, Park Slope Food Coop, Photos, Riverdale, Senior Project, Surrealist Training Circus, Taxes, Two Books For One Buck.</div><div><br /></div><div>And then twice that much mass in different kinds of blank paper.</div><div><br /></div></div>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-45469764651444846522010-03-20T18:18:00.000-07:002010-03-20T18:30:21.238-07:00Two Hands: a Framework for Elementary School Conflicts<p align="RIGHT" style="text-align: left;margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal; "><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">This description is a formalization of how I've been handling conflicts between the elementary students I work with. I wrote it up for a presentation I did this weekend with my restorative justice reading group. I was a little self-conscious about sharing it with the wider world of social justice educators, because I know there is a vast body of work that much more experienced educators have done, which my small experiments aren't tapped in to. But it was exciting for me to write up what I'm doing, and to realize that I have built up a system that works for me and for my students. So here goes:</span></span></b></p> <p align="CENTER" style="text-align: left;margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal; "><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">I facilitate an after school arts program for K-5 students. Below is the framework I've cobbled together for myself for handling the small conflicts that arise each day between my younger students: snack stealing, poking, name-calling. Two Hands is an image offered to me by Pamela Lindsay, a fellow member of this year's nycore Restorative Justice Inquiry to Action Group. It refers to this: One Hand is up, in self protection, and to indicate a stop. The other hand is outreached, willing to talk. I sometimes make and explain this gesture to my students, to make my intentions visual and concrete. I constantly use the image to center myself in what I want to offer young people when I am frustrated with them, and they are frustrated with each other. Before considering any punitive response, I offer the opportunity for a firm, clear stop, and then a period for reflection without judgement. I think of this conflict mediation as a curricular offering. It is the main way way I help young people build empathy, listening, and self-reflection skills that help them avoid escalated conflicts, and prepare them for successful participation in more elaborate conflict resolution later in life. </span></span></span><span><span><span style="font-weight: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">This method</span></span></span></span></span></span><span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><span style="font-weight: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;"> draws directly from the readings done with my ItAG, particularly </span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span><span><i><span style="font-weight: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">Lost at School </span></span></span></span></i></span></span><span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><span style="font-weight: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">by Ross Greene, </span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span><span><i><span style="font-weight: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">Giving Students What They Need </span></span></span></span></i></span></span><span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><span style="font-weight: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">by Jonathan C. Erwin, and </span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span><span><i><span style="font-weight: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">Punishment By Rewards </span></span></span></span></i></span></span><span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><span style="font-weight: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">by Alfie Kohn. It also is highly influenced by my training at the Village Free School in Portland, Oregon, and democratic education theorists like John Holt, Ivan Illach and John Taylor Gatto, whose work Free Schools like VFS try to enact.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The Script I Use:</span></span></b></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal"><span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">1)</span></span></span></span><span><i><span style="text-decoration: none"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">It looks like something upsetting is happening here. Stop. Lets talk.</span></span></span></b></span></i></span><span><span style="text-decoration: none"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;"> </span></span></span></b></span></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">I intervene in conflict in two ways: when I witness something escalating, and when a child approaching me upset about something done to them. In the latter situation, I ask </span></span></span></span><span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">do you want to talk with them about it with me? </span></span></span></i></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;"> They usually answer yes. In either situation, I </span></span></span></span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">bring the two or more children to a quiet or calm area on the periphary of the space we are working, and sit or kneel at their eye level.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal"><span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">2)</span></span></span></span><span><i><span style="text-decoration: none"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">What's going on? What's up? </span></span></span></b></span></i></span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><span style="text-decoration: none"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">I</span></span></span></span></span></span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;"> ask each participant this question, emphasizing the needs to hear both people speak. </span></span></span></span></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">If a unified story doesn't emerge from the children's own narratives, I offer a story that takes everyone's experience in to account, and ask them to agree that that's what happened. Sometimes, this agreement is not possible. When this is the case, or I really can't figure out what happened, I affirm that I trust both children, and state that I can't help if we can't come to agreement. This is the end of the mediation. </span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;"> </span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">3)</span></span></span></span><span><i><span style="text-decoration: none"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">How does this make you feel? </span></span></span></b></span></i></span><span><span style="text-decoration: none"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">If </span></span></span></span></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">we have a unified picture, I ask this question to each involved party, generally trying to bring out all party's experience of having been 'wronged', and modeling language that looks at the situation, rather than blaming one individual or the other. The ideal is that this exchange of perspectives is in itself a resolution- and sometimes it is! If the young people have practiced expressing their feelings,witnessed each other's perspectives, and seem contemplative, satisfied, or empathetic, I stop here.</span></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">4)</span></span></span></span><span><span style="text-decoration: none"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">Hints at Resolution.</span></span></span></b></span></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;"> If both parties are still focusing, I ask them if they can think of a compromise, solution, or next step. If they don't have one, I might offer one. Often kids glaze over as I begin this step, and so I conclude my thought, and thank them for talking with me, and for listening to each other. I consider any small modeling of language that can be used for resolution to be useful, even if we don't come to anything at all like resolution.</span></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">What This Isn't:</span></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal"><span><span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">-This is not for gigantic problems:</span></span></span></b></span><span style="font-style: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;"> Two Hands doesn't have any punitive measures in it at all. When issues come up that involve safety, health, or extreme distress, then I do rely on the system of time-outs, calls home, and other external punishments used by my coworkers. I recognize the importance of consistent consequences within a school, but I still don't feel great about implementing them: it makes me feel like I'm embodying false authority, perpetrating hierarchies, and teaching young people to passively comply.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal"><span><span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">-This is not forcing resolution:</span></span></span></b></span><span style="font-style: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;"> Often I don't feel resolved at the end of mediating a conflict: I crave some concrete improvement. I ask myself a lot: What does success look like? My best answer is: success looks like kids who are willing to acknowledge that problems occur, and can identify their role in them using relatively accurate and descriptive language. Success is a school community that makes time for everyone to try to work out their problems, and where children honor this process.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal"><span><span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">-This is not assuming blame: </span></span></span></b></span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">When I make time to listen to a whole situation, I often find that the child who appeared to be causing trouble feels legitimately wronged, and that the one I first pegged as a victim was in some way an instigator, too. </span></span></span></span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;"> In response to this, I focus on the wrongness of a situation, rather than re-enforce either child's conception of who is to blame. In most schools I've worked in, teachers become the ally of tattlers. I want to mediate conflict in a way that also supports kids who rely on aggression or silence in tough situations. I continue to have trouble navigating how to do this, while still honoring the distress that usually compels a more effusive student to involve an adult. Mostly, I use physical affection, and make sure to emphasize who has crossed some important lines. (</span></span></span></span></span><span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">It is not right that she took your snack, but it's never okay to hit</span></span></span></i></span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">.)</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal"><span><span style="font-style: normal"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">-This is not asking for apologies:</span></span></span></b></span></span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;"> Apologies between my students are usually pretty empty, and even seem to create pathways for them to think it's okay to be disrespectful. (</span></span></span></span></span><span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">but I said was sorry!</span></span></span></i></span><span><span style="font-style: normal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#660000;">) I try to model empathy, but I don't ask kids to fake what they don't feel. This can still feel weird: sometimes my students don't seem remorseful at all. Sometimes the weirdness is okay, and sometimes a time-out or call home makes sense as a next step, as an additional space to encourage reflection. </span></span></span></span></span></p>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-37964067656500496982010-02-14T14:11:00.001-08:002010-02-14T19:24:29.536-08:00Internally echoing snippets, half synthesized, for February:<div><br /></div><div>My partner and I agreed on no valentine's day. nothing.</div><div>he said:</div><div><i>we're not going to do <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">that</span>, are we?</i></div><div>and surprised, knowing he performed such rites for less cynical lovers, I respond:</div><div><i>oh, of course not! no way!</i></div><div>Neither of us would be caught dead appearing an inch more romantic than the other.</div><div>There are so many other places in need of energy besides each other.</div><div><br /></div><div><div>I say to my parents proudly, when asked:</div><div><i>oh, we don't </i>do<i>, valentine's day.</i></div><div>The red envelope of their hallmark card responds:</div><div><i>WE do valentines day!</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Yet another way you are linking me to convention, </div><div>you are the lens through which they can see me as both whole and (thus) normal.</div><div>the avenue for, the wall to push against</div><div>my own right to delineate the markers of my adulthood</div><div>a site for pruning and shaping of these inherited values.</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>and yet, I am thinking about the collective wisdom that makes holidays.</div><div>most obvious in December:</div><div>we give ourselves the remembrance of goodwill, as the weather gets cold. </div><div>or November, we bolster bountifulness as the last greenery dies.</div><div>what about February makes us need love?</div><div><br /></div><div>The enactment of this holiday, in fact most of them,</div><div>is so terrible that I cringe to admit the craving is true.</div><div><br /></div><div>March doesn't give us much, in the world of printed cards.</div><div>But in my life it's a big one, the month for Optimism.</div><div>As a kid, we'd get the last two weeks off for break.</div><div>and the first week is my birthday.</div><div>Break now replaced with your birthday</div><div>and, this year</div><div>the day we celebrate </div><div>that we have been choosing to do this thing together for two years.</div></div><div><br /></div>you don't have to come in to my room when the door is closed, and you can hear that I'm crying.<div>and yet you choose to, in my weakest moments, witnessing me frantic and collapsed<br /><div>The everyday of you taking this on is that saying yes.</div><div>The exact affirmation for these slowly lengthening days.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-19620314107532247662010-01-05T18:46:00.000-08:002010-01-06T08:45:01.219-08:00Imagining an Honest Thank You NoteDear child I care about and their really great parent(s),<div><br /></div><div>Thank you so much for the holiday present! It really means a lot to me that you thought to include me in your seasonal thank you's. Sometimes I feel a little pushed around at your school, like people don't see that the work I do running the afterschool program, which is also a large chunk of your student's arts programming, as a vital part of the education and support the school provides. It really feels good for a family to see me as important enough that I get a holiday teacher-present. Your kid is great, and I'm not just saying that. I really love how much of my job is about tending to young people's emotional experience, and I am learning so much about how to respond to sadness, happiness, frustration, anger, entitlement, wronged-ness, confusion, panic, exhaustion, overexcitement, glee as I support your child through their after school hours. </div><div><br /></div><div>I have to say that I'm disappointed in your choice to buy me a Starbucks gift card. You weren't alone: they comprised all but two of my work-related holiday presents; its a little bit uncanny. I really don't want to seem like a brat here, but I don't like Starbucks. I try not to buy anything there. I feel strongly that corporate franchises are not doing good to culture or the planet. Big chains need to fill a lot of stores, and so it only really makes economic sense for them to do business with other big producers: large-scale factories and factory farms. I understand this scale of production and trade as fundamentally unsustainable. Because any chain store location provides the same feel and products as the first one you ever visit, I believe franchises foster a comfort with sameness. We place a high value on the convenience of this sameness: we know what to expect, we can replace our favorite product, trade in presents, or redeem gift cards any place we go- but as a trade off we are handing over what places make us comfortable, and what stuff we choose to buy (and thus eat, wear, drink, read, play with, listen to, and decorate our spaces with) to a smaller and smaller group of design "experts". Starbucks is particularly problematic to me because of its cultural position as ambiguously alternative and creative. By evoking some platonic ideal of an independent coffee house in its design, Starbucks has helped institutionalize the homespun coffee-house aesthetic, forging a model of how to profit off of the human need for identity expression through a process known as branding. Starbuck's is also thought of as vaguely conscious: and it is true that it is the largest buyer of Fair Trade coffee in the world, and has made some notable efforts to decreasing their carbon footprint.. In making symbolic changes towards greening their business practice that distract from the ways they are really wasting and abusing resources, they are participating in a scary phenomena known as 'greenwashing,' a play on 'whitewashing', that refers to corporation's ability to placate customer's ecological concerns with illusions of sensitivity that amount to almost no actual ecological change. Starbucks very successfully enacts all of the big trends that scare me about corporations, and they do it well. Receiving their gift cards almost exclusively as a holiday present from families, though, has made me newly aware of the uniquely awful role this company plays in society.</div><div><br /></div><div>Look, I know this letter is kinda obnoxious, especially because I'm ostensibly writing to say thank you. Maybe you know all that stuff already, or maybe you don't agree with my beliefs about Starbucks. But because I love your child so deeply-though only a tiny fraction as intensely as I'm sure you feel about them- I feel a special intimacy towards you, which makes me desire to be honest with you. I don't think it's your fault that you thought buying a Starbucks gift card was a good idea, it's clearly the most socially acceptable, normal thing to do. You don't know much of anything about me, and you don't know where in the city I live, so it makes sense that you'd want to get me something as universally appealing as warm beverages, and that you'd want me to be able to get them whatever place is convenient to me-but I've already explained how insidious I believe this valuing of convenience is. There must be other options.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is depressing that our common ground is Starbucks, I believe we can do better. How can we move beyond the expectation that we will endorse global chain stores, to function based on a common ground that is sustaining to our community, our city, our planet, our culture, and to each other? One family got me a bottle of wine, which I think is pretty awesome, but you could get me any number of foods or drinks, at whatever level of sustainability you wish to endorse. Or you could make me something! My mom and I used to make little tins of cranberry sauce for all of our teachers. I make it for myself at Thanksgiving, now, and think of it fondly as 'teacher cranberry sauce'. Sometimes we'd make coffee cakes instead. I can see the appeal of a gift certificate, though: they're easy to transport, and guarantee that I'll like what I end up with. If this is the case, you're in luck! The school we share is in an amazing neighborhood filled with small businesses there that I'd be happier to support. For one, there's A Little Bit Wicked, that new little vintage shop on Houston- which I know is a painfully obvious real-estate gain of the gentry, but I have to admit I like to browse through, and would love to get a sweater at. Every so often I cave on the way to work and get an amazing brownie at Clinton Street Bakery, so a gift card there would also be a huge treat. There are a couple of sweet little coffee houses across the street from there, too, if you're intent on this hot liquids theme. There are also a whole bunch of food establishments nearby that I have strong feelings for from having visited them as a child- Russ and Daughters, Yona Shimmel Knishes, The Doughnut Plant, Guss's Pickles, Katz's Deli, Economy Candy. I love Bluestockings Radical Books, but I bet that's kind of, well, radical for your taste. Any one of these places, I would be proud for you to give business to on my behalf. Starbucks, on the other hand, makes me feel kinda trapped: I do want to access all the cash you and other families collectively spent on presents for me, and I know that they have already made the money you spent on the gift cards, whether or not I redeem it for 10 or 15 chai lattes. A lot of people shop at Starbucks, whether or not they have gift cards, so I'm looking for somebody who I can trade all the cards for cash with, someone who would definitely be endorsing Starbucks anyway. My dad offered to trade with me, but I just know that he'd go to Starbucks more often if he had them. I might trade him some, and I might also ask my ex-boyfriend who goes to Starbucks a lot, though I suspect he'd find it kind of tacky. Once I manage to trade them all in, I promise I'll use the money to buy myself a holiday present that I'm really excited about, and I'll think of you. </div><div><br /></div><div>Happy New Year,</div><div>Rachel</div>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-57636319693708383642009-12-27T17:53:00.000-08:002009-12-28T08:04:29.721-08:00looks like they inspired?There should be a phrase for the opposite of <i>that's just like</i>, of <i>it reminds me of. </i>Language keeps me from easily reversing the subject.<div><br /></div><div>When Kerry was sledding down the hill on his stomach, Aunt Nancy said he looks just like the penguins on the Wii, I thought: <i>no, the penguins look just like Kerry. </i>But, in pointing out the things we see, we are failing to reverse our order. Could we evolve to say <i>Kerry! Look at how he slides on the snow! The Penguins on the wii look just like him!</i> Or, <i>Kerry looks like what the penguins on the Wii are imitating! </i></div><div><br /></div><div>What is happening to us, now that the real sensations of the world remind us of our own simulations of it? Who has wrested control of our capacity to be inspired? </div>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-45006613162242526392009-10-25T06:45:00.000-07:002009-10-29T22:39:16.548-07:00new schoolOn my first day I got a list of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">forty</span> names.<div>To pick up from their classrooms.</div><div>To do this job right I'd need hours, or days, but I have 10 minutes.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is no time to make this a safe transition. </div><div>Clutching little tentative hands, holding little weeping shoulders. </div><div>wanting to make it okay, its okay, little strangers.</div><div>I don't know anything about you to know why you're reacting so intensely.</div><div>I know I'm another strange adult telling you where to go,</div><div>after a long day of strange adults telling you where to go.</div><div>How do I tell you I'm different, and am I?</div><div>I'm going to trust you, so we're going to like each other. But now there's no time.</div><div>firmly grasping their tiny hands, pushing <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">the undersides</span> of their backpacks down the hall</div><div>all I have to offer is an empathetic smile, crouched down to their eye level.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>Its like herding cats down the hallway</i></div><div>these two swinging their clasped hands</div><div>this one dragging his backpack, that one dropping her coat.</div><div>one grabs each of my hands, one runs out front, one speeds back in the opposite direction.</div><div>There are other lines of children, and teenagers, and parents, and teachers. </div><div>They are looking at me and they are moving faster and quieter and in <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">straighter</span> lines.</div><div>I am so frustrated! My little masses breed anonymity.</div><div>I think or maybe yell at them: <i>what is so difficult about being quiet and staying in line?!</i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Quickly I learn: t<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">here is always a reason</span></div><div>that catatonic little body in room 214 is afraid of the bathroom, so hasn't peed all day.</div><div>one's streaming tears are for his father, who some days gets off work in time </div><div>to pick him up early from after school to play chess, but not today.</div><div>She runs back down the hall because she forgot the leather jacket her mother just bought her</div><div>He drags his backpack because he was teased all day, he is weary and ashamed.</div><div>This one punches all the little <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Russian</span> girls and wanders, </div><div>That one speaks openly of violence and greed- he's 5.</div><div>I don't know the reasons yet, but someone will.</div><div>Children aren't ghosts, they're full people. </div><div>What if all the teachers knew that its the system that's flawed, and the kids aren't to blame?</div><div><br /></div><div>As weeks go by I often think: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">kindergarden</span> is torture</span></div><div>yesterday they were all rain-drenched from a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">field</span> trip with a backpack full of fresh picked apples and a pumpkins bigger than their head- they lug and skid them in my direction, this self-sufficiency is beyond them. Would it really be so hard for the parents to be allowed back up in to the classroom at the end of each day, so they didn't have to move their things up and down stairs?</div><div><br /></div><div>When I share stories of tantrums and meanness the parents say</div><div><i>it's just that by the afternoon, they're so tired. she hasn't figured out how to eat lunch in 20 minutes yet, up until he went to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">kindergarden</span> he always took a nap.</i></div><div>I assure them that their child isn't the only one.</div><div><br /></div><div>Where is the optimism in this? Why have two months go by and I don't dread my job?</div><div>Because I know being an administrator means trouble-shooting: I spend much more time fixing the few problems than witnessing the many small joys.</div><div>Because a good education, or a good life, is not one where a person is always happy. That my children cry and scream and punch and crumble does not mean the school is bad, it means they feel comfortable expressing their feelings. </div><div>Because I am strongest in the face of some perceived injustice, and increasingly I see schooling this way.</div><div>Because children are beautiful, trusting and resilient. They smile and they crawl in my lap and clutch my arm, and let me hold their heads and waists and shoulders when they are serious or sad.</div><div>Because I am learning to do hard things that are useful, and which I will do better for the rest of my life for having done this job this year.</div><div>Because I believe that I am good at this work, and that there is such a thing as a transcendent educator, and that learning to be this is the same as learning to be the best version of myself.</div>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-24535400735366507372009-10-06T07:38:00.000-07:002009-10-19T20:25:05.040-07:00Preparations for DepartureLast month I went to Philadelphia to see my old friend Dan's show in the Philly Fringe Festival. It was called <i>Preparations for Departure </i>and was created and performed by Colin Aarons, Jessie Bear, Emma Furguson, Daniel Perelstein, Sasha Shahidi and Jackie Vitale. I am writing a review for them, to use my small piece of public space to amplify the huge feat of their production. I'm sorry its taken me so long, Dan, its been a busy month.<br /><div><br /></div><div>Six friends play house in an old factory basement on the fringe of philadelphia. I wander the space with the rest of the audience and smile at how clearly it spells out this process: All the old furniture they could find, and their hand written letters arranged carefully in the nooks of this raw cement room. I melt watching Dan playing the youngest brother. The way these friends relish their scripted, imagined domestic life together makes obvious how intimately they know and love each other.<br /><br />Collaboration is hard. As I watch the show I am astonished that these friends conceived this play from nothing in two months, and that they lived together while they did this. When they unravel their family, half-way through the show, it goes from slightly saccharine to <span style="font-style: italic;">ballsy</span>: they stop time, rewind, slow it down, speed it up, fragments of the story bounce around the space and you know the chaos is entirely intentional. They are in perfect sync with each other. I make up stories that they did not intend me to see, and I gasp and cry. This is what intimacy is for, their show is an almost too explicit example. It confirms my conviction that big acts of sharing with other people are the most worthwhile kind of difficult.<br /><br />Dan comments on the size of the audience: small. and lots of cast member's family. He scans the web for reviews that night, nervously. Where is the public? Where is the praise? They have worked so hard. I want for him the validation he craves because his show is beautiful, but feel saddened by the external craning towards success. I want it too. It is painful that the audience never gets out even a fraction of what you put in. How else could we frame our success?<br /><br /><br /></div>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-32505761445452280942009-09-30T17:19:00.000-07:002009-09-30T22:34:22.558-07:00There are Really No Experts Up ThereI return to this city, I have never thought much of as an adult.<br />Only the passing: <span style="font-style: italic;">I live here</span><br />or, <span style="font-style: italic;">I will never live here</span><br />or, <span style="font-style: italic;">It makes me miserable even to visit.</span><br /><br />and here I am, worrying for my feet in their hemp slippers as I walk again on concrete.<br />Sitting on the subway, for hours, like everyone else.<br />Reading new books from the book store I stumbled in to, eating the plastic-wrapped sandwich from the nice bakery when I don't make time to pack lunch.<br />With gentleness, I try to shrug off the compromises of transition.<br />Settling takes a long time, or maybe all the time I have.<br /><br />Perhaps I do not know that things will ever feel out of limbo,<br />but I do know I am definitely still in it until I find an apartment.<br />the process has been and continues to be messy.<br />Four of us debating, fighting, frustrating, falling apart at one another.<br />Where should four young white kids live? And for how much money? And in how much space? And with what sense of urgency? And under what terms?<br /><br /><br />And in what literal space?<br /><br />Shut up with the discussion, lets stand in a place and say yes or no.<br />When shit gets messy, we all talk about it and then I feel really good.<br />And then it gets bad again.<br />How much togetherness? How much patience? How much compromise? How much self-interest?<br />Stretching my <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">infinite</span> gullies of empathy, or artificially narrowing my options?<br />There are definitely no experts up there to tell me how to do this.<br /><br />And so, there is no reason to navel-gaze.<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Rachel, You have already made this decision.</span><br />The willingness- from my gut and not my brain- feels really good, and correct.<br />Trusting that I only have partial control over this situation.<br />Entering in to our second month of hunting, I feel much more calm.<br />There are many more decisions left to make.rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-6056666691819787022009-09-01T11:24:00.000-07:002009-09-01T12:46:01.201-07:00An anecdote of hesitancy for our growing esteem for convenienceA few months ago, my parents got <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">iphones</span>. Equal parts pleased and horrified, I watched them integrate this new technology; fumbling with the tiny keyboards, googling things that excite them in the car, downloading music identification programs and dumb gimmicks and laughing riotously at the sound bites included in their new <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">ifart</span> application. seriously.<br /><br />Since we switched our family cellphone carrier so that they could upgrade to these smart phones, William and were invited along- he said yes, and unsurprisingly, I said no. Insisted that my old phone was fine and refused to switch plans myself....until the universe intervenes and my phone of course broke that week. of course. Practicality won out over what-might-have-been-morality-or-maybe-just-greenwashed-naivete, and I chose not to switch to a mediocre "green" cell phone carrier, but to get a new phone on our new family plan. I painted her with the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">junky</span> nail polish I hoard exactly for this purpose, and programmed her name, Patience, in to the top screen, an unintentionally centering reminder every time I look nervously at my phone.<br /><br />This weekend my family of four piled in to the car with our three smart phones and one dumb phone for a weekend on the beach. Honestly, I can't remember the last time we got along so well on vacation- not that everything went perfectly, but none of us got arbitrarily worked up in the unique ways my brother and I have inherited from our parent's dispositions.<br /><br />Were we really all so much more mature than before? Everything just seemed to go so smoothly. When we got lost, someone would query our location on satellite and look up directions. When we didn't know where to eat, someone would google a good place go to. When we wandered off from each other, we'd just text each other to figure out where to meet up again. When conversation got stale or tense, Will or Dad would call up the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Youtube</span> video that I'm embarrassingly obsessed with right now (no seriously, its deeply wonderful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms2klX-puUU), and we'd sing along.<br /><br />So this is great, right? This little device just smoothed out all the ripples, took care of the mechanics, the logistics, the dumb stuff that gets in the way of appreciating that we are a family of smart and healthy people, who might differ and argue, but who ultimately are blessed for our circumstances and for loving each other and getting along.<br /><br />But I find this so disturbing, that we are trusting this technology to intervene frequently in our family, and trusting it to assume so many of the little responsibilities that stem from the circumstances of every day life. I worry society is loosing these skills- to navigate, to make plans, to trust other people to take responsibility for their own whereabouts and safety, to think ahead about objects or knowledge we'll need later on, to ask other people for help or recommendations, to be content with not always knowing what the best option is, to let some things be mysteries, to negotiate daily tensions with the people who are most important to us.<br /><br />This is the change that is happening in the world around me. I have no control over our decision to embrace an expanding variety of mobile technology. I go on this tirade a lot, lately, and I've been forcing myself to find some lightness in the situation. I shrug and smile and say: <span style="font-style: italic;">I don't know, I guess I'm just a late adapter. I didn't get a cell phone until it felt like everyone I knew had one and payphones started disappearing. I'm sure I'll come around.</span> This casualness puts whoever I'm with at ease.<br /><br />This change in technology makes me feel angry and scared. Indignant, like why the fuck do people want to do this to their lives, and how come I don't get a say, and why does everyone find it so rude when I want to talk about it?<br /><br />On family vacation, though, what I mostly felt was sad. Every smart phone intervention made me want to make some <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">snarky</span> comment. When I did, my brother and parents laughed and rolled their eyes at me in that loving way they often do. When I kept my mouth shut, I'd spend the time articulating some more forceful anti-technology rant that I sometimes couldn't hold back from espousing a day or an hour later. Either way, I know I'm enhancing my family's view of me as an anachronistic curmudgeon who takes herself and the world too seriously.<br /><br />And this makes me feel so distant, just like I did when I was 10, but didn't have any beliefs to back it up back then, and so I wonder whether its just my <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">contrarian</span> disposition that makes me feel this way about smart phones- or about anything else, or whether I was a crazy intuitive child who had none of the words to describe why the world made me upset. There is no way of knowing, ever, whether my beliefs determine my disposition or the other way around.<br /><br />And so here I am writing against technology on my blog, on the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">internet</span>, not claiming to be a purist but wondering if some day will come when I will want to be and will be brave or sad enough to try.rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-50890774798451331202009-08-21T12:04:00.000-07:002009-10-10T23:05:09.604-07:00Talking Towards Clarity: a vocab list for the summerHere are the important words for the summer: the words I tried out to express what was going on as it happened, the words that allowed me to reach for something newly true.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Struggle</span><br />Endlessly useful since I stumbled on to it at Arvo's House this spring, with two basic uses: articulating internal struggle, and respectfully, positively discussing "negative" feelings about other people's choices and creative endeavors. I am trying the experiment of replacing "dislike" with "struggle with" as often as possible, though a good deal of the time I find the resulting statements very scary, and can't say that they're true. This seems to reveal what about myself and the world I'm unwilling to look at, unwilling to change.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Agency</span><br />generally used in discussion of adulthood. I started thinking about this at Buck's Rock, trying to describe the look of panic in the teenager's eyes as they left camp, and the immense sense of relief it brought on in me, to no longer be at their moment in life. A useful term for describing the exciting and terrifying possibilities of being an adult (see below). Also seems to be useful in articulating parts of the creative process. Still looking for a good definition of the term, though. I feel like I'm wielding it around experimentally.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Transcendent</span><br />Almost by definition, there's no way to pin down how I've been trying to use this word. It emerged first in the phrase <span style="font-style: italic;">transcendent friendship</span>, something I came to while grappling for language to describe the experience of being with Zander and Jonah this summer. Entirely unique but not catagorically different: the intensity of my two months of sharing with them allowed me to articulate the catagory of relationships that become their own internal world, and that yeilds some something that feels huge. The idea of transcendence is not entirely secular, but somehow I'm sensing that the word itself is farmiliar enough that I can get away with using it in a secular context, or at least that it doesn't feel too far out of my realm of experience to use it to authentically describe my own experiences.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Adult</span><br />This is a messy one. At 23, I feel bashful about speaking of myself as an adult, but also it feels true. I might be a new adult, a young one, but what I and all my peers are really doing right now is definitely getting a handle on adulthood. Priorities, careers, ambitions, money, bodies, families, relationships: these are the things we stumble in to discussing and then look wide-eyed in fear at each other (not unlike the look of teenagers getting their agency taken away: the "oh shit, this is real" look) I am struggling a lot with the relationship between partnership and adulthood. I feel that the realities and challenges of being partnered with Kerry are helping me grow up: be a better listener, more open minded (okay, just slightly....), more patient, more giving. I know I am tapping in to this ability in how I deal with other people, but Kerry is really the site of this slow learning. I balk at myself, attempting to define the process of maturing through such a conventional standard. And I reassure myself: this is by no means the only way to adulthood, or the only path in my life that is growing me up. But real, committed acts of sharing between people- labels aside- is a positive avenue of growing. As I feel myself becoming both more willing and more able to enact sharing, I find myself thinking that I am becoming more adult.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br /></span>rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-81875556562284934392009-08-21T11:25:00.000-07:002009-08-27T13:29:38.208-07:00Start Where I am Comfortable, Move to Where I struggleafter all of those fliers for healing circles around Portland, I can't use the word 'healing' without grimacing, and so instead I say about my summer, that it undid, unravelled, reset, restarted. As I left, the thoughts lingering were: gratitude, comfort, ease, transcendence, readiness and and fulfillment of ideals.<br /><br />Buck's Rock is a city of tiny wooden cabins, hundreds of them, probably, 500 or so people bustling through their days, Working in small nooks, living in tiny enclaves. The young people, or rather their caretakers, pay a tremendous amount of money to be there, and the slightly-less young, the anyone-over-roughly-17, are themselves paid-if very little- to be the surrogate caretakers. Their jobs are very specific. They live with the young people, or they cook their food, they direct their plays, or sew their costumes, or instruct them in painting or video editing or sports. My job was to teach yarn crafts to whoever wandered up the hill to the weaving studio wanting to know. Some days I taught 15 crochet lessons, some days I waited and made hats for my friends.<br /><br />This is by no means some Ultimate place, but like any other small and isolated community it takes on an other worldliness that makes it so important for those who stumble in to it and for whom it resonates. Returning to work there was accepting, if sheepishly, all the privilege that allowed me to be one of those people- my parents attentiveness and affluence that bought me a place of belonging in my 6 summers there. <br /><br />If not healed than reset, restarted: my two month's returning did so much to make me feel composed and okay. <br /><br />Some of this was no surprise: At Buck's Rock I felt like a good teacher. Because I was teaching skills I am well versed in, my days were filled with small revelations in how to teach better. Because of the ease with which I could navigate this strange institution, the ways rules and routines resurfaced from embedded teenage memory, I had strong opinions and the comfort to articulate them. Because many people already knew my name, it didn't take long for them to stop and wish to talk with me. I felt again like the world was interested in what I have to say.<br /><br />Some ways I could not have anticipated, or two of them. Or one of them. I am filled with so much gratitude for the company of two new and old good friends. Zander, who came back to camp with me, and who I knew I was setting off to recharge a friendship with, and Jonah, who I had not even seen in 6 years, maybe, but who I knew immediately. within 12 hours. would be important to the journey I was about to go on for the summer. When people ask about my summer, there is no language that feels serious and real enough to explain how important they were to me. Maybe this will come to me with time. It doesn't feel sufficient to say that they were just really good friends. <br /><br />And a million little ways: Thin walls that let the rain and wind through, so you are never quite inside. Grass and trees everywhere, sunshine for picnics for lunch. Endless arrangements of hundreds of colors of yarn, access to clay and glass and sewing machines and a million other arts I didn't have time to try. People to cook for me and do my laundry, so much free time and safety. Kind of being a kid again, but now I yearned for purpose and not for freedom, could fill my time with purpose because I'm some adult now, freedom is a given. I felt affirmed that I am not a child any longer.<br /><br />Start where I am comfortable. <br />Move to where I struggle.<br /><br />Two months was a luxurious chunk of time to revel, to accept all the affirmations available at buck's rock and to store it up, holes of doubt filled with resevoirs of confidence for the future when it will not be so easy.<br /><br />I am moving to new york city, the week after next. I will run an after school art program at a magnet school on the lower east side. I am filled with doubt about these choices, but choosing to see them as imperfect and correct. What isn't easy also isn't wrong. Moving to the place I struggle wth most, moving towards actions and ideas that challenge me, making space for the friendships there with all of their non-idealness, incompletion, moving forward together with kerry committed to the space between him as a person and the unattainable ideal partnership, moving closer to my family and all the discomfort and challenge the details of each other brings up, moving towards art-making because ultimately there is no other option. <br /><br />I couldn't stay at Buck's Rock forever, even if I wanted to, and yet/but also I happy that it is time to move on. There is no time I'll be more ready.rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-7664862353513277272009-07-27T20:51:00.000-07:002009-07-28T14:19:46.435-07:00Buck's Rock Earth Day: BREaD<span style="font-style:italic;"><br />"Find your work and do it"<br />"Find your work and do it"<br />"Find your work and do it"<br /><br />And there is so much work to do.</span><br /><br />-likeafleshyspine.blogspot.com<br /><br />This little piece of work fell on me, BREaD, allowed to be my brainchild, this day for earth. I have no good langauge to describe it, still, it all comes out too serious or too stupid. Earth Day, a problematic compromise, better-existing-than-not but I-wish-it-was-not-necessary. If only every day could be Earth Day, I have said and cringed. But with BREad, I push this place that changed me so much as a young person a little bit in the direction I am pushing myself.<br /><br /><br />For this last week I drowned in BREaD. Ran frantically, flaked out on my real job and pulled every favor and sobbed on the front porch of Girls Annex after I had to plead my 200 coworkers to find 3 more volunteers. I felt isolated, self-righteous, delusional, enraged. And then I think <span style="font-style:italic;">but I would not be the person who would take on this event if I had not been through this place when I was young.</span> I have to have faith in Buck's Rock, this institution that meant everything to me 10 years ago, but now some days I see only as failed potentials and flaws. Buck's Rock moves me: I feel raw at the realities of privilege that did not enter my mind 10 years ago, and mushy with sentiment for my own adolescence and the sweetness of those summers of connecting with other people for real for the first time. I remind myself that I am making BREaD with buck's rock, not in protest of it. This is an enactment of an ideal: motivation by equal parts love and rage. I am offering what I know back to those who have loved me and will listen. I am not cutting ties. I continue to engage in exactly those places where fucked-upness happens, because I am given so much license to engage here, out of equal parts seedy privilege and beautiful trust.<br /><br />This week organizing again proved itself to be a transcendent work. I wake and sleep bread, every free moment, every conversation an opportunity to further it. There is only It. There is no more Me. I am now certain: there is almost no difference between making art, making education and making change. They can all be routines or experiences, and they are what push me to that other part of myself, that most intense breaking point where something Real is Happening.<br /><br />My sense of perspective goes and comes, like during any project: I make hasty mistakes, grow bags under my eyes. my heart beats faster. Do I love big projects more for their results or for the connectedness their urgency makes me feel? I run to the field late one night and throw my hands up as the clouds recede:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">this is all for you. whatever you are. big clouds and starry sky. I wish I believed you could send me affirmation that I am doing right by you, planet. whether pathetic, symbolic, or giant, these thing I make are all I have to offer.<br /></span><br />For next year, or for some other project, I ought to remember:<br />-do not underestimate young people's interest in serious things. some kids are ready, and they should be catered to. perhaps everything else is just fluff.<br />-educational organizing is two tiered: teaching the teachers is teaching, too.<br />-big plans don't go well hastily, so don't plan anything you know you don't have time for.<br />-no one can snicker when you show self awareness. the most important thing I said to staff was "I know this sounds super crunchy and earnest, but that's just kind of my game"<br />-the final outcome is always smaller than the dreams. this does not mean you did not succeed.<br />-interpersonal connection is not an illegitimate path towards learning. do not be afraid to ask favors from friends.<br />-if you want good media coverage, recruit people to do it far ahead of time and get on the same page about what good radio/newspaper/photo representation looks like.<br />-people do better with warning: get the schedules to the campers at least a day before.<br /><br />http://www.photoblog.com/bucksrockrachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-36452279407176237632009-05-21T09:27:00.000-07:002009-05-21T17:43:14.553-07:00Seasons In The ValleyI went to see <a href="http://www.seasonsinthevalley.com/#">Seasons In the Valley</a> to be a good new local to the Hudson valley. All I knew was that it was about migrant workers on Hudson valley farms. An organic farmers cooperative was showing it as a fundraiser. I thought: 'hell yeah! way to be political!' <br /><br />I assumed, like a colleg-y liberal, that any film about migrant workers would be critical, a film about globalized labor and human rights. It turns out a distinct half of the audience agreed with me.<br /><br />I chuckled to myself as I picked a seat: 'oh, look at this age segregation. young folks in the back...those cool kids...and old folks in the front.' I sat with the old. The movie started late, to a disappointingly sparse crowd. The premise was this: It's just so great that Hudson valley apple farmers can hire men from Jamaica to do work that no local will do! what a beautiful symbiotic relationship! The enemy: the globalization of the food system, which makes Hudson valley farming an economic impossibility, collapsing this way of life that is noble for both the farmers and their workers. The film, it seemed, saw itself as capturing this beautiful slice of life just before it died. <br /><br />I saw the Jamaican men's homes and children, built and educated with apple farm money. The farmers talked about how hardworking and reliable the Jamaicans are, and their wives waxed poetic about their apple picking skills (<span style="font-style:italic;">it's like watching ballet!</span>) and the character of all Jamaicans (<span style="font-style:italic;">Jamaicans are just the salt of the earth!</span>). It took me close to half the movie to realize that this jubilant tone was not a set-up for a deep, dark expose. The white American farmer's peachy, superficial praises felt condescending to me, and I craved for the film to name them as such. Instead, there was a critical-ish segment about overt racism that the migrants experience: cashiers who won't touch their hand when they give change, an old man who hit a migrant worker with his car and was let off with a low fee. The white farmers shook their heads and the Jamaican workers said basically <span style="font-style:italic;">whatever. white idiots...it's their problem. no reason for me to get bothered. I'm just doing what I have to do to support my family</span> The racists were this anonymous other. not interviewed in the film, peripheral to the story. <br /><br />I am unsettled. What biases made me assume that there was no positive story to tell about migrant workers? Why is it that I can't take these farmers praises of their hired help at face value? Why do I find these Jamaican men's attitude frustrating? I find myself wishing for them the privileges in life that would give them the option to get more pissed. I leave wanting to assert that globalization of food production is just one peice of the big problem, that globalized labor is a parallel, interconnected problem. But then, I don't have the facts to back myself up. I know that this movie is inaccurate. I know that there are great violations of workers rights that occur in the Hudson valley- hey, I had friends who did work about that in college! but I don't know enough to know what in this movie is actually wrong, besides a gut sense that no one is speaking entirely honestly for the camera...<br /><br />When the lights come up, I realize that the audience segregation marks more than age. The film-maker, taking questions, points to a farmer featured in the film in the row in front of me. Two professors in the back row are PISSED and spew criticism about the responsibilities of representation, the need to acknowledge historical trends of oppression, the unacknowledged skewing of the interviewees comments by perspective and skin tone of the American film crew, and the root cause of compensation: if this extremely hard work was compensated fairly, Americans would do it. instead we exploit the hardships of the depressed Jamaican economy, without looking at how America makes that so, to get this 7-days-a-week backbreaking labor done. <br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">oh be quiet!</span> I find myself thinking at the academs, after a while. <span style="font-style:italic;">Let these sweet farmers have their rural lives. </span><span style="font-style:italic;"> Their affection for their workers is offensively diminutive, yes, but to them this is radical, and you must admit it's progress. Let them send their grandchildren to college and be labor rights advocates.. </span> <span style="font-style:italic;">These changes take time. </span> And yet my attitude towards these farmers makes me feel condescending. Isn't respect believing that all people are capable of grasping the full truth of their reality? Isn't it my work, as a young person, as an artist, a person with access to great education, as a person at all, to try to make what I believe to be the larger contextual truth clear to any person in terms we can both understand ? Or what if the farmers are downright lying, and these are the very farms that are overworking, underpaying, exploiting, endangering their workers? I have no way to know.<br /><br />One man asks why none of the Jamaican workers are here to see themselves on the screen. A woman asked why they didn't film at the Jamaican bar. There is a an all-white generational/cultural/class deadlock here, and I am sitting on the wrong side. I yearn to be some intermediary, but what I say comes out all rosy...in response one of the professors tells me there's a petition I can sign for fair farm labor laws, if I want something I can do to help. <br /><br />That's not enough. There are a lot of idealistic rich young white signatures on that petition that don't really know what the situation is, because we only read about it. It's not our life.<br /><br />I ask the filmmaker: <span style="font-style:italic;">isn't there a way you can present this film in such a way that it helps the community it's about make positive change? There is so much that is charged about this film, in what it includes and what it leaves out. How can you use that as an opportunity to inspire growth, change, awareness? </span><br /><br />He says to me <span style="font-style:italic;">isn't that what we're doing now?</span> I can't hide my dissatisfaction. This is a conflict, otherness-es in this rural college town are just being affirmed. no one is moving towards common ground.<br /><br /> <span style="font-style:italic;">But I like this film, I have no regrets about it. I set out to make the film I want to make and I made it. Now it's grown up, it's like a child that's gone to college. I'm not responsible for it any more. </span><br />Only now do I get mad. No. this can't be the way. Don't evoke your role as an artist, and say you're not responsible for the affects of what you do. Responsibility is your role. You got these two demographics in a room together to watch your film, which is a great and beautiful feat. Now its your job to do something with that, to do your little bit to make more peace.<br /><br />But who am I? Hell, I sign the petition, but to me this is one in a litany of problems that I have only obscure or common-citizen connections to, that I can write about, read about online, but release as, ultimately, not my piece of work.rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-33362995829206347822009-05-04T18:49:00.000-07:002009-05-21T12:51:07.117-07:00gulpHana said this winter: <span style="font-style:italic;">oh, you've already <span style="font-weight:bold;">made </span>the decision to be an artist. That is what you're doing, Rachel. you don't have a choice'</span> Okay, okay, I guess you're right. Hana. Mom. Dan. Laura. Alison. people I respect deeply in every part of my life, and who I desperately want to be right.<br /><br />But what does that even mean? With what time and space? With whose permission, and towards what goals? I know I don't have the answers, but I've just begun the first step of allowing myself to want.<br /><br />I struggle with any cinematic narrative of what happens to me, much as, like anyone, I relish in sharing them. Stories about stumbling in to love and heart wrenching break-ups, about going far away to realize how much I love my home. <br /><br />This is the one I am struggling with right now: that I have no choice but to call myself an artist. gulp. I did it. everything is better, everything, when at the end of the day I say 'lets go to the studio' and all my crap is there, even if all I do is make beautiful little drawings. Or if I do nothing. And despite the fact that it's still hard to get myself to work.<br /><br />I guess I failed to channel my sense of self away from the things I make, I haven't had any authentic desire to try really be a teacher or a farmer or a student or a citizen in the same way as I, self consciously say, I am (gulp) an artist. I can do lots of other things but I am committing to wrestle with this label first.<br /><br />And right before I left for the farm that turned out so awfully, my parents said I should use this room off the garage as a studio. I had actually forgot it existed, until they cleared it out this year and kerry commented on how beautiful it was. And it is -so- perfect and beautiful. <span style="font-style:italic;">you spoiled brat...of course a better thing than you would have thought to dream of was waiting there in your back yard.</span><br /><br />My own contract for this position. Moore flow charts. Beautiful drawings. Hats to sell. Recycled notebook pamphlets. Birthday, graduation, anniversary presents. Curriculums for summer. Jobs for the fall. New Big Dreams. There is so much to make.rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-5546070048048318792009-04-28T09:41:00.000-07:002009-05-04T18:49:48.818-07:00Place I do(n't) belongnToday an old dream died.<br />That there might be a place where I could go where I would instantly be my best self<br />I could take with me all the things I am proud of, and leave my shit behind<br />I'd bring the clothing I look beautiful in and the books I ought to read.<br />Make only enough money to get by and want only what it could purchase.<br />work selfless all day, and improve myself in every spare minute at night.<br />With none of the trappings of my previous corrupt life and self, I could be only good.<br /><br />Where is this place? Strangely I placed the wishing on to something so particular.-internships-<br />go and work for strangers, and accept housing as payment. if they do good work they must be better people than you, and if you make their life your life, you will instantly be good.<br /><br />In Portland the distance between this dream and reality was devastating, and I struggled with it. made some peace and left. It was hard and messy, and I learned a lot and have no regrets.<br /><br />Part of what allowed me to feel good about leaving was the plans I'd made. teaching crafts this summer, farming for the spring.<br /><br /><br />The one week on the farm, well, that killed this dream.<br /><br /><br />At first I was only embarrassed at my own assumptions of what this place that hired me would be like. My gut learned quickly what my brain already knew: that growing up in farmland, you are a very different person than that rosy-faced city slicker who got in to growing food out of their politics. This farm is not a lovely liberal haven but a business. A hard day's work. I felt determined to learn about growing food here as some antidote to that brain-oriented urban world I grew up in to.<br /><br />But slowly I found the people mean, and felt myself embroiled in interpersonal dynamics that would obviously only get messier. Felt on edge in their home. Was not learning much about how they did things, was not so impressed with what I could glean, after all the on-paper idealist farm theory, the time spent with farmers with perspectives more like mine. Sure, privilege and class and culture all helped me feel uncomfortable at this farm, but just because people aren't like me doesn't automatically make them better people, either. They can still be in fucked up power dynamic relationships, unhappy zombie work lives, slaves to the television just like everyone else. Labelling them 'authentic' and translating that to wisdom is as condescending as it is respectful.<br /><br />My best self lies in the trajectory I was born in to. Problematic as it may be, it is not a worse story than anyone else's. Instead of living for free in the house of struggling strangers, I'm now in the second home of my own family, whose abundances and struggles I know too well project any false dreams in to. I can't believe it's come to this, living here for free for the month, working for neighbors to make some spending money. This is not to say I ought to live here without deliberation, or even without guilt. But for now it feels right.<br /><br />I'm not going to aim for this liberation through uprooting: drastically changing location, or willing my interests, passions and joys to change. Kerry made a good point about this, that I've been thinking a lot: it can be a terrible thing to live on one's born privileges, but it can be antagonistic to refuse one's privilege and believe that salvation lies in pretending I'm self-made. Everyone is community made. All of this support from my family, these opportunities or ways of thinking I have learned from this college I paid for, I do not want reject them on principle, I want to sort them. I am not transplanting, I am pruning myself and my family tree.rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-30499403824119892242009-04-12T23:41:00.000-07:002009-04-28T09:40:55.190-07:00StruggleI was flipping through books on the farmer's shelf in Santa Fe,<br />One was something like "the 10 essential questions of judaism, answered!"<br />It was mostly terrible, but it said:<br /><br />Q: does a person need to believe in god to be a good jew?<br />A: No, many jews do not. What defines Judaism is to be in relationship with god, to not be apathetic to his existence. To be a good jew is to struggle with him.<br /><br />Now, I am not ready for the question of god,<br />(not to mention the pronoun they use...)<br />or don't find it relevant and might not ever,<br />but nevertheless this struck me. <br />Definition by struggle.<br /><br />I have begun to use this word, constantly.<br />in any situation where I wish to honor my commitment to sit with <br />something I haven't figured out yet, and might not ever.<br /><br />The peak was two weeks ago, at Alison's thesis opening.<br />I spent three days with her project: helping set up, at the opening, on my own on the floor, trying to put in to charted words.<br />I did not love it with ease, but felt committed to wrestle with it<br />look hard at the things that inspire me and frustrate me.<br />try to find words.<br />I would say to her:<br />I struggle with your project, alison, <br />but I hope you see this as a compliment. <br />that is what I intend it to be<br /><br /><br /><br />If I make a list of all of the things I struggle with,<br />the result names all the important parts of who I am.<br />A more complete list, a more honest version, <br />than I'd make if I sat down to make a list titled <br />"all of the important parts of who I am"<br /><br />And so I have started making this list.<br />What do I struggle with?<br />The privileges I was born with, my race, my unshaking desire to spend time making art, my impact on the planet, new york city, judaism, my relationships with my parents, my brother, kerry, my former housemates, alison, max. My extended family. My desire for nesting. <br /><br />and then, if I title this list as "the defining things about rachel" I have a more honest picture of myself than I have ever made before. A list to struggle with.rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-13343094132182650402009-03-11T19:34:00.000-07:002009-04-29T22:00:05.479-07:00big thoughts in the midst of Americalike many others, I have traveled across my country. <br />In real time, (not airtime)<br />or something close to it. Automobile time.<br />Dips in to small towns for gasoline between hours of superhighway.<br />Days or hours between trips off the highway, to SEE some of the things that we are actually passing, and I realize all of these cliches for myself:<br />how huge this nation is. Every place we whiz by is a world of places.<br />These endless roads through desserts and plains and mountains and forests.<br />These strip malls, billboards, box stores, rest stops, "indian trading posts"<br />(really, what the fuck? I was surprised to see one, but there must have been hundreds)<br />These things too, are America.<br /><br />Because we are not anything more than tourists. We're not special. We are taking the highway that the government made for all of the long-trekking americans in their gasoline chugging cars. that is what we are.<br /><br />here is my own poem to America, cringing as I add to the chorus who writes one.<br />The great, great opportunities of this vast space,<br />and the tremendous burden of our scale<br />the yearning for a one-ness, for a nation as trustworthy as a small town.<br />this, the 300 million of us can never be.<br />Too many humans, too many towns. stores, objects, options, jobs for America to ever assume the honesty of looking someone in the eye.<br />The story of this country is the growing anonymity, or maybe the fight against it.<br />Each facilitated by that exact search for interconnectedness,<br /> made possible by technology. the roads, the railways, the maps, the corporations, the telephones, the cell phones, the internet that make us all feel like we can each connect with anyone. that make us believe we could all know each other.<br /><br />With my aliegence to the big America I must by definition be nameless, <br />in the grand scheme of things. In Portland I felt like there were a million of me, on their bikes to their low-pay-feel-good job. I want to feel like part of a movement, but it makes me feel like a cog. Find someplace smaller and different, make a commitment to belong to some more just place.<br /><br />but I am all an American. my good and my bad.<br />this white jewish new york vegetarian queerish progressive artsy college grad kid, driving from the coast of fantasies back to the coast of home with a nice guy and a new car filled with old clothes.<br />There is nothing of me that is not part of this story.<br />Despite all this privileged pressure to be Wordly and Travelled,<br />I could live my life in this nation, and only grow my worldview, still not know nearly all of it.<br />There is soo much truth for any one person to hold as true.<br />Even just here, in America.<br /><br />Do I tell you about the beautiful things I have seen? The gorgeous mountains and sculptures, the curious lives so much unlike my own.<br />They take so much more space in my memory than the hours of strip malls and suburbs.<br />Many places made me say "how could you live here?" off of any exit on any road.<br />But when we find the place we are stopping, when it is the home of a person. a life. there is something beautiful there. This is not random, of course, they are places we sought because we thought they'd be nice. But I am also trying to remember to think against judgement (something I am not good at) Often I don't believe it, but maybe everyone in America is doing the best they can.rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-66827482737204690142009-02-28T18:55:00.000-08:002009-03-23T19:57:18.130-07:00goodbye"but whyyyy are you leaving, rachel?" they clung to my arms and waist. Goodbyes bring out sentimentality, and the children at both schools shed their disinterest in me that at first made me so distraught, but with which I'd grown comfortable. I have learned to accept that good teaching is a confrontation of my ego: when students are most engaged they are not smiling up at me to thank me. Sometimes, being a good teacher means not being needed, means being ignored.<br /><br />But when I am leaving, I am no longer in the background of their child-centered life. Now it felt greedy to say: I am leaving now, I will no longer make this safe container. our classroom, our school. Now you must think about me as a person, not a quiet force, because I am going but your container remains.<br /><br />I looked them in their eyes and cling their little bodies, frecked round faces, rosy cheeks, stretchy velor dresses, tight ponytails:<br />If I were just deciding whether or not to be your teacher, of course I would stay. But when I look at my whole life, all of the different options that are in both places right now, it feels right for me not to be here. I am excited to go, and I know that there are lots of people who will care for you here.<br /><br />At one school this felt more true than the other, especially after the rudest girl in my class said, after I scolded her for maybe the 10th time that hour, "now don't you ruin your nice streak before you go!" ohh, that attitude in her that every teacher tries to break down. If I was the nice teacher, how are the others? She was the student that taught me to find it in myself to be authoritative and firm.<br /><br />Another said "will our next art teacher be colorful, rachel?" and my heart cracks open. Just weeks earlier they were saying "why do you dress like that?" and I assumed I was being judged, 8 year olds thinking I'm uncool. Their sadness at me leaving restored my confidence that teaching is something that I am good at, and for my last few days I relished every moment like I wish I had all year. The timing made me ache so hard.rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6564874945018704381.post-83402167828031990382009-02-16T17:37:00.000-08:002009-02-16T19:45:47.078-08:00Parallel PathOnly in the relinquished expectations of I-am-leaving-soon, of course, I am able to relax in to where I am and see how this life right now might become a full one. I imagine the parallel path, where I was not choosing to leave in two weeks or even three months, and the steps I would take:<br /><br />Were I not in half-detachment, I can only imagine the love I'd put in to the studio, the classroom at school I can almost call "mine" these days, by how others defer to my decisions there. They remark: we should find an intern to run the studio next year, a volunteer. It is really a full time job, and they say I do it well. I ache: if I cared to really do my best here, ot would be a beautiful place. An art studio where I have total control of the layout, and the students make whatever they please? I am satisfied with the place the the student's products, but just that. Leaving, I feel this confidence in my ability to do things I am proud of, and as I am commended and faired well at the school, my potential feels like a secret.<br /><br />In parallel life I might apply to work there, part time. I might stay at my other school, or not. <br /><br />The neighborhoods I'd live in. The friendships I'd pursue. The places I'd keep buying and finding my groceries, the dance class I'd keep taking, the drawings I'd make, the cafe's I'd try to show them at. This could be a life, here, but it is not the one I am choosing.<br /> I opened all these doors, seven months ago I knew no one here, and now I am closing them. It feels unfull, these people who do not really <span style="font-style:italic;">know</span> me yet, and who I do not <span style="font-style:italic;">know</span> yet, but never will. Frustrations not worth resolving, tensions I fake my way through with pleasantries. I am escaping soon. <br /><br />Sometimes it feels like a break up: the bad outweighs the good, here, and so it is not worth the effort to mend whats not right. I worry sometimes that I am running away, momentarily, but I know that the things this phase has brought up in me will not dissapear when I leave. That I don't have to stay here to confront them.<br /><br /><br /> I have actually come to the period of conclusion, after so much waiting. boxes laying open in my room to be packed. Everyone I know knows I am going, they look at me and its the first thing they think. endless loops of 'so, soon, eh?" conversations, without meaning to we have all started to detach.rachelthelimehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07445880989016403400noreply@blogger.com0