Thursday, May 24, 2012

Crooked

I did in fact finish Sister Citizen last night although I'm sure I'll be rereading it. When I picked it up I found The Drama of the Gifted Child underneath and wondered, after all that searching, if I should read it. I tried but it's just a bit overwrought. When it was time to sleep I realized that I wasn't able.
When I get up during the night it's because I need to go to the bathroom or something hurts. When the night starts that way it's usually because my head is racing.
I picked Sempre Susan from the stack and read until 1:00.
No matter how badly sleep I can't stay asleep once there's day light in the room. I used to love sleeping late. It felt transgressive. Most days I don't even nap.
A brief mention of Sontag's problematic mother comes fairly early in the book. Made me smile. Continuity of a sort. Sontag gifted her son with the same absent parenting but thought of herself as a great mother because of their adult relationship.
I realized another book is missing: Swimming in a Sea of Death. I keep staring at the shelf on which I think it should be as if I can will it to appear. Where do they hide?
It feels pretty good to have this much writing hit the page. It's rough and rambling but it's getting done and that feels good. But the theme of the problematic mother, albeit somewhat universal, is not sustainable. My sleep issues and daily activities aren't that compelling. My lost and found book shelves wont' go very far. Oh dear. Hummina. Hummina.
Sister Citizen organizes around the ways in which African American women are set into boxes of identity. MHP actually talks about the crooked room theory. The theory comes from cognitive psychology research in which people were put in a crooked room with a crooked chair and asked to align themselves vertically. Some people couldn't ... get straight. Heh. I think the Temple Grandin movie begins with her talking about the same experiment.
When I was quite a bit younger, decades really, I was out in a wooded area with some friends from high school  smokin a bit o da weed. From a bong. Someone dared me to drink the bong water, which I think might have been wine.
And.
Of course.
I did.
Of course.
We were on a hill. When I stood up I kept trying to stand straight up from the hill. And I kept falling down. "I can't get straight!" And then we'd fall down laughing.
MHP extrapolates that, because of all the stereotypes of black women it as as if they are in a crooked room. They have to figure out how to align themselves in terms of identity.
Also a long time ago I put a picture in a journal in which a person is running and leaving a trail of masks behind them. For years I thought there was a more real me. I still think that's somewhat true. When I was at EA I never felt like people were very interested in the things I was interested in and I didn't know that much about games. Gamers have a culture with a language. I wasn't false there but I wasn't very much of myself. From the minute I left I felt myself expanding.
And then Mom comes for a visit.
Maybe in a crooked room it's OK to lean a bit.
And then fall down laughing.
 

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