some thoughts about political engagement

1. You must expect complicity as your baseline. Instead of looking at the ways in which a person fails to be the perfect, superhuman activist, one should observe the ways they rise above complicity. It isn't wrong that people should look first to their own survival, even to their own thriving.

2. When it comes to issues that aren't your primary focus, the goal is to find a compromise that isn't particularly reactionary that works for you. Maximizing your functionality as an activist and a human being matters. You are not a perfect superhuman activist either.

trouble contemplation

I don't think I've written much that was good since I came here.

Which is alright; it's not like I haven't been getting plenty else done. The breakneck speed isn't always good for me, though. I am living in a flood, and so far my best writing comes from long percolation.

In my nonexistent free time I'm reading Delusions of Gender. It convinces me of what I already knew but constantly doubted; this world really is stacked against women.

And poor people, and brown people. And neurologically divergent people, and disabled people. And fat people. And people with unsupportive families. And, god knows, adult survivors of child abuse.

The question is how to live gracefully in a world that's stacked against you--not in a moment when the column of tanks is about to mow you down, but all the years and months and days and moments before that. How do you stay hardworking and reasonable and uncompromisingly kind, and not take it laying down?

How do you live?

sometimes

when I'm trying to sleep all I want to do is dance.

:)

still in love

Friday afternoon means catching my breath before diving into the weekend's worth of work. It turns out to be a problem that I'm so bad at doing things half-way--but not a big problem.

I am slowly conquering grammar.

There are moments when I think--this is going to be ok. I can do this. Not just this, now, but this, life. We are diagramming sentences in Greek, just like when I was learning to teach English, and I remember how much I love that. A little thrill goes through me; I could actually use my CELTA when I get out of here. I'll have a bachelor's degree. I can go to China. I can have a life.

This week has been hard. You can't leave the past behind you. Yesterday we opened a cow heart, slitting the vena cava to lay it flat, cutting through the rubbery lips of the right atrium and and into the rich dark muscle of the ventricle. It is easier than I thought, up the other side and down the septum, my scalpel forcing away a perfect cross section, just like the model but so much more real, bloodier and less color coded. I have declined gloves so that I can feel the differences between flesh and vein and fat; when I lift it up the blood goes to my elbows, the meat is thick and dripping, and the veins that hang off the top are bloodstained pink. When I close my eyes to sleep, the heart is in my chest but my hands are still trying to rip it open.

So I go downstairs; my friends are talking about seminar. Georgias: better than Meno, we think? The security of military bases in Israel? What goats won't eat? How to get your taxes done? Correlations between dance ability and sexual performance? The big project Y did to clarify the logic Socrates uses about rhetoric and justice? This is a strange place full of strange people, and most of us didn't belong anywhere else. It is good to come home.