The Boy From the Bus

 My high school in Maryland was an experimental school. I don't remember the descriptors of the experiment but there was more freedom than I'd had in Pennsylvania. I arrived for my first day of class with my culottes and sweater vest, my circle pin, my perfectly applied Bonnie Bell makeup and my hair in a flip created by an hour with steam rollers on my head. In Pennsylvania I'd been a hippie because I wore beads and said groovy. In Maryland there were real hippies, especially boys with long hair. I don't remember if Bill sat next to me on the bus or if I sat next to him. I don't remember if he was friendly first but I think he was. I do remember flirting and talking and being friends. I wasn't in love and neither was he but we were friends. He was cute. Long blonde hair. So cute. And we sat together on the school bus.
My appearance changed. Jeans and shirts.No makeup. No bra. Hair gone wild. I was going through so many changes so fast and not with anything like grace. I was just trying to keep up. We hung out in groups on the school yard. We skipped school and drank Boone's Farm and smoked skunk weed and Marlboros. We read Tolkien and Kesey and we dropped acid. I'm not sure how much of this I did with Bill. I remember the bus. I remember going to see Ike and Tina Turner. I remember having a kiss on a bridge in a wooded area and him touching my breast. We weren't in love. We just young. We were just starving. We were just being kind.
I never saw him after high school. I haven't really thought about him in years. I'm a member of a Facebook group for my high school graduating class. Today someone posted the obituary for Bill. The boy from the bus is gone.
From the obituary I learned that he was married and had two kids. I don't know anything else. And it's OK that I don't. We don't all stay connected. It's just life. I feel regard for his family as I would for anyone. I feel a little sad. Mostly I am flooded with memories. Little tiny memories. So long ago. But I can remember his smile. So cute.
My class is having a reunion barbecue this weekend. I can't go but it makes me happy that they're going to be together. And these memories of the boy from the bus make me feel closer to them all.
 

Louie

I heard Louie C. K. being interviewed on NPR the other day. He talked about a scene from his new show in which a fat woman had a monologue. I like Louie's show but he can be ... oh...gross, or something. So I tuned in with a certain amount of trepidation. I liked the way he talked about it in the interview but it is not my experience that fat people are well represented in the media.
The show starts with Louie and a very fat man gorging at two restaurants. Other than giving me a mad craving for vidaloo and puri it didn't hit me in any particular way. And then the "fat woman" enters the story. And. It wasn't horrible. It wasn't perfect. But it was interesting. Afterward I thought more about how much had been packed into it, including the idea that Louie was embarrassed when his friend told the waitress at the second restaurant that they had already had a big Indian food meal. It's one of the running themes of the show. Moments when Louie thinks he has a chance with a woman and something goes wrong, which is usually about who he really is being revealed. The Louie on the show is a character written by Louie, based on his life but not actually him. And the character is frequently a jerk.
So. He's a jerk when the very cute and very smart and very engaging fat woman approaches him. No surprise. He's a jerk in the end as he takes her hand and looks around to see if anyone is watching. He might want to be a better man but ... he fails. Almost always and certainly with the fat woman.
However. There was the monologue. The monologue he wrote. I found it interesting. I intended to write about it but the day went by and I wasn't getting it done and then ... I read another blogger's reaction. I didn't have any argument with her reaction. I even had a few of the same thoughts. She is fierce and  radical and smart. She didn't see anything to like in the scene and she has really good reasons.
It was a scene in a television show, written by a white man with all of the privileges of that perspective. It was really well acted. It lasted quite a while, in other words he sat back and let this woman articulate her feelings. Of course they were really his feelings, or what he imagines a fat woman might say. I get it. All true. But I found it interesting. I found it moving. It made me think. Not in the sense that I heard some truth I hadn't thought about before but ... it made me think. I find it some what hopeful that this kind of representation was on television.
Louie is problematic in so many ways. But he makes me smile. He makes me laugh. He makes me think. I find myself wanting to talk about his show but I always recommend it with lots of codicils. And I'm not defending him, or elevating him. I feel like I should do more of a line by line break down of the monologue but I'm not feelin it.
I think is awake. I think he is challenging. If I were twenty years younger I might ask him out.
Heh.        

It's a Fat Thing

Years ago a friend of Mom's drove her to pick me up at the airport. I had not previously met this particular friend. We had a nice enough chat on the ride home. A few days later Mom told me that her friend had said that when she first saw me and saw how fat I was she wasn't expecting much. But then as we talked she decided I was really very smart and interesting. Mom thought this was great because, despite my bad first impression (the impression determined by her friend's hatred for fat people) my personality won the day.
Yeah.
I'm told I also have such a pretty face.
I have more than a few of these kind of stories. Stories about people telling my friend's and family things about me/my weight that reflect their own hatred. Or things like the guy who shouted from a car that I should eat a salad once in a while. Or the guy that said he wouldn't have sex with me because he wasn't into saving the whales.
Or.
And.
So on.
More recently, a friend sent me a link to a PBS special about women who had undergone some form of lap band or gastric by pass surgery. The women were friends who knew each other as a result of their participation in size acceptance communities. Now some of them were losing weight and it was causing problems in the friendships. I'd heard about it. I knew it also contained some size positive people but I wasn't interested. And yet, I tried to watch a bit because ... I dunno. I wanted to be able to say I had if he asked. I guess. I may have watched about ten minutes or so. I don't really feel like writing about it.
But.
It did bring up a feeling I've been having lately. It's a feeling that I have really not made any difference in terms of how fat people are seen in the world. Not in terms of the culture or society but more painfully not in terms of my friends. Not in terms of the people who ... know me.
All the things I've written. All the things I say. The way I live. It doesn't connect.
I know people love me. I'm not feeling unloved. My mother loves me. But even she thought her friend had a right to judge me because of my weight and that I had to prove that I wasn't like "that".
I know people have heard something that I've said and made a connection with an idea that they didn't even know they had. I've seen it. But it doesn't stick. It falls into the drone of bad ideas that are out there and disappears.
I read a blog post, which begins the way I've begun so many of my own posts with an explanation of who the writer is including what she eats and how much she exercises. It made me feel tired and sad. I understand why she begins that way. Pretty close to every time I write about being fat there's something about how I eat or how much exercise. I started a whole blog to write about how I eat with some intention to prove that I'm not like the stereotypical fat person. And I talk more and think more and about my own food issues because it is such a feature of ageing for me.
Today I read a post by the mighty Ezra Klein talking about fat jokes and discrimination. It was a relief to read someone who isn't fat write well about the issues. And cite research. He might have made a link between the "obesity epidemic" and the bullying but of course even he notes that lap band surgery might be a good choice for someone's health.
What.
Ever.
Maybe I'm feeling this way because I'm living in a new city. I've met some cool people but I feel myself trying very hard to connect. Too hard. Like I need to be funny and smart and insightful and interesting. I feel the tension that I know I've lived with all of my life. I need to prove that I'm not like "that."
But.
I am.
I am like that.
I am a fat person and that means that my sense of myself in the world has been shaped as much by the experience of being fat as any thing else. It hasn't been all bad but it has actually ... shaped me.
Please. Please. No virtual hugs. No consoling remarks. Again. I am not feeling unloved. I am extremely loved by more than a few people and I am grateful for it every second of my life.
I always assume that I have work to do in terms of unseating racism, sexism, all the isms, in my own heart. It's a process and a commitment. And I have work to do in terms of unseating my own internalized fat oppression.  
It's a fat thing.

LBJ

Did I tell you about the time I met LBJ? Because there was an event to honor the passage of the civil rights act this week I've been thinking about him.
My dad sold Lincoln Mercuries at a dealership owned by the mayor of Austin. I think he sold a few to LBJ. Dad was adamantly Democrat but not actually politically aware. One year my grandmother and two aunts took a road trip to Texas to visit he and my half sister. He knew Grandmom in particular would be thrilled to meet the President. We drove out to his ranch but who ever was supposed to be there to give us a tour was not. We hung around on the lawn while sheriffs with big ol cowboy hats and mirrored sunglasses kept their eyes on us. I'm not sure if I remember it clearly but I think Dad was irritated and embarrassed. Grandmom and the aunts were hot and cranky.
My half sister and I were mostly bored. She was about 12 or 13 at the time and had taken to wearing a hair piece intended to make her hair seem long and straight. She wasn't that good at attaching it and it didn't really match her hair color so it looked somewhat odd. I was in my Teen Magazine phase so in photographs I am always posing and never looking directly into the camera. None of really ever are looking into the camera. We look like shoplifters who are trying not to be noticed.
There was a tourist shop in the nearby town. Plates, ashtrays, shot glasses, t-shirts, all with LBJ on them. There were jars full of grass clippings from the ranch.
A few years later Dad bought a ranch of his own and some quarter horses. He raced them on the weekends. We were often at the track. Our family now included a new wife and a step sister. The sisters dressed in matching cowgirl outfits. I wore patched and ragged blue jeans, a tye-dyed t-shirt, no bra, mediation beads and a rosary hanging from my hip, peace sign button another that read: Frodo Lives.
The president was at the track one weekend. Dad introduced us. Two good American daughters and me, the freak. That was actually pretty cool of Dad.
Like so many others, I didn't really think in terms of The Great Society as I shook that hand. I thought in terms of the Vietnam war. My memory may not be clear but it is one of a weak-fingers-barely-touching-not-really handshake. Neither one of us wanted to get too real. Listening to all the speeches this week I think I could have been nicer.
These memories come in the context of my last post and current thinking and continued frustration with the arch of justice.
It's been interesting to watch Mom, who raised me to believe there was "no difference" but married two men who used a word that we only mention by the first letter. And bought me panty hose in flesh tone with no thought about the colors of flesh that they would not match. She doesn't like to think about the things that aren't easy. She likes the narrative in which it all works out if you work hard and play by the rules.
In the book I am reading (Thank you Kristina) a character says: That is all there is -- perception and memory. But it's ragged.     
I think of these scenes in which I am a point of view. I am a point of view in a group of others. I can only imagine what they saw. In fact, I can only see my self back then in light of all I'm thinking now.
But there are clear facts.
I met LBJ.
I wish I'd purchased one of those jars of grass.

Rigorous Hope

Saturday night I watched Twelve Years a Slave. It is an amazing movie. Great acting, great cinematography, great writing. And it's so hard. The next morning MHP hosted a conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates and other profoundly intelligent people in which the notion of white people holding the tragedy of slavery was articulated. 

I watched a movie, which was a representation of a book which was a representation of events that happened a long time ago and I knew there was going to be a (somewhat) happy ending. And even with all those layers, all that distance, I could barely stand it. I wanted to look away. I wanted to fast forward. I wanted to make it stop. I felt the emotion for days afterward but there is a difference in the emotional price I am paying and the price people of color pay holding those same images. 

We are all wounded by racism. Our institutions are, our country is wounded by racism. It is our history and our present. We can not talk about hope and change and liberty and justice for all as if we live in a Disney movie. We live in a story that is still being told. Ta-Nesisi articulated the idea of rigorous hope. Hope that isn't surrounded with hearts and flowers but is felt as muscle tone.  

Of course when I think about these things I start to list all of the oppression in the world. It's not overwhelming but it is fragmenting. 

I've been working on (and never finishing) a post about my purple bathroom. The bathroom is painted purple. Mom had some purple towels, which I swiped. I already had a purple shower curtain. I bought a purple bathmat and a purple hook on which I hang my purple bathrobe. There are purple non slip palm trees in the tub. None of these things is the same shade of purple. It's really quite amazing to me. Some are more red and some are more blue. Some are lighter.

And because I am such an abstract person I look at all these purples and I think about color and in many ways and I think about skin. I have known very few black people. I've known people in many shades of brown. I have only known a few white people. I think I haven't finished the post because it felt dopey and didn't really lead anywhere and revels how my thinking is less than rigorous.

Years ago I read a man writing about how he realized that when his wife, who was a painter, looked at a hillside and where he saw green she saw shades of  green and brown and yellow and more. I don't remember who wrote it but the idea stayed with me and comes back to me in my purple  bathroom. and I'm thinking about all the colors I see in skin. 

But now I think of broken and bleeding black skin and my eyes fill with tears. I do not need comfort. I need to have those tears. I need to feel that tightness in my throat.  

Right after I watched the movie I watch Doc Martin. It was on. I enjoy it. It makes me laugh. 

And that's how it is when you live with choices and freedoms and privileges. I listen to smart conversations. I read smart thinking. I watch tragedy and comedy and it's all part of something. 

The voting rights got passed and the Supreme Court takes bites out of it. 

Marion Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln memorial 75 years ago today. 

A woman who played the part of a slave with broken black skin accepted an award for her wonderful acting. 

Things are better.

And worse. 

   

    

Ritual

Caroline Casey often says, create ritual or live melodrama. I'm sure she says it in relation to some planetary influence but I don't remember which or why. It's just always made sense to me. I've had rituals in my life connected to spiritual practice and I've found then comforting. Usually at some point they become rote and start to feel restrictive. But there is something about performing small acts of reverence that feels like ceremony. And ceremony feels like drama is a (somewhat) controlled sense.
With that in mind I wanted to create a daily ritual once I'd settled into the nest. Seemed like a simple thing to do. I wanted to find a way to formalize my gratitude and also do yoga. But I am rarely simple.
It felt like I should start the day with my new ritual but I have to eat pretty much first thing. If I don't I get wicked stomach aches, don't want to eat and then at some point in the afternoon become insatiable. Protein works best. I eat eggs pretty much every day. In San Francisco I walked from the bed to the computer, also turned on the radio, stopped long enough to make breakfast and take it back to the computer. There were days when I didn't get dressed until noon. Now I live on a main street with a wall of floor to ceiling windows. If the light is shining a certain way and if you happen to look up it's like I live in a diorama. People really don't seem to look. And my pajamas aren't particularly revealing. I'm not overly worried about being seen. I could keep the blinds drawn if I were. But Monday through Friday I get up, take a shower and get dressed before I make breakfast. On the weekends there are some news shows on radio and television that I like so my shower comes later. I also wanted to get away from being in front of the screen all day every day. Now I eat at my table or on my butcher block and delay getting to the desk.
Well.
Of course.
To be honest.
I check email and Facebook on my phone first thing every day.
Heh.
And I still turn the radio on first thing with rare exception.
TV on the weekends.
These tiny little shifts in behavior are fun but they are not a formal, reverent, ritual. But OK. I get through all that and then ... a ritual. Right?
I have always wanted an I Ching. I specifically wanted someone to give me one. I took advantage of  a gift certificate from Kristina to get one a few months ago. The Ching is not easy for me. It took me awhile to decide to use pennies instead of looking for special Ching coins. I had to read how to do the casting and I'm not at all sure I'm doing it correctly. Then there was Mom's visit and my trip to North Carolina and wanting to recover from all that by burying myself in a Sims coma. And finally this morning, a Monday morning, the start of a new week morning I decided to try to do my ritual.
First I shower, poach some eggs, feed Benedict, turn on the computer.
And then I toss the coins. My hexagram? Shing: Pushing Upward.
Seriously?
Further reading talked about success with effort. By then I was having an energy crash that I sometimes have in the late morning and I needed to lay down and close my eyes, which I find hysterical.
I had a battle with my elevator door awhile back and I lost. I ended up on the cement floor of the parking garage. I pulled myself up a few steps. The whole thing hurt my shoulders in some muscle straining way. Even small movements can be painful. This too will pass but no yoga for now.
The hexagram talks about heaping up small things and bringing small offerings. All very encouraging.Lots of "no blame." And so I will not count this morning as the beginning of a new ritual but as a small offering toward that idea.
I'll keep pushing upward but verrrrry slowly.    

Home

Weird thing happened when I returned from NC. When I walked into the nest I didn't feel a sense of being home. I'm not even sure what I mean by that. I haven't lived here that long and there are ways in which I haven't fully internalized the fact that this is my home. It was days later when I stood up, turned toward the kitchen, took in the sight of my cookbook corner and smiled.
I've had the thought that so much of what makes a place home is about habits. It's about the sound of the radio when you're taking a shower and making breakfast. The lights that you turn on when the sun starts to set. It's about the smell of the hand soap.
I think for people in relationships, or with pets it's about hugs and kisses. Maybe. I don't know.

I've been in state of gratitude since I first walked into the nest. Grateful just to be here. Grateful for the people who helped me get here. Grateful for every house warming gift. Grateful every time I do laundry. It's been a long time since I've experienced such spontaneous, sustained gratitude.

Maybe the opposite of gratitude is resentment and I have plenty of that. I have a deep well of resentment. I can tap into it at any moment. But I tap less often. 

If you tell me to look at the positive, I'll tell you to learn to be able to endure the negative. I get very cranky, very quickly when people are all about the positive thing. I have made, I try to make effort to be authentic. And sometimes I am not authentically... positive. It's not about making that OK. It just is.
There's something about wholeness. Something that requires acceptance. Mara tempts and assaults and is always there. Should we ignore Mara? Be entertained? Who knows? But what I feel is that these emotions and experiences and embarrassments are not to be denied. 

And.
I feel more positive things than I have in years. Every color on a wall. Every book on a shelf. Every plant in window. All my stuff. It's all here and all unpacked and I look at it all with new eyes.
But I didn't feel immediately at home. It doesn't worry me. It's just curious. It's like wearing a new outfit and not being sure of the fit, or the style.
I actually think it's a very good thing. The radio I listen to now is OPB, which is NPR with Oregon content. The lights I turn on are all linked to one switch, which makes me smile for no particular reason. The smell of the hand soap is the same but the water gets warm faster. I haven't established habits. Or at least none to which I cling. It's really hard for me to imagine a time when living here won't feel like an amazing reality that I did not see coming.
Maybe that's the way home feels.