Kingsolver and current events

almost six months ago, my attention was drawn to all the conflict in Palestine more than it ever had been before. a house down the road from us began flying an Israeli flag all of a sudden. half of all the social media posts are still imploring everyone to speak up, to choose a side or else by default choose complicit cowardice. the news of October 7 and all the terrible news since has been rightly hard to ignore.

since December, my old land acknowledgements post from the summer of 2020 has been oddly popular. the basic stats in blogger tell me it's gotten more than 100 views within the last 30 days. by comparison, a typical post here in this random collection of internet musings gets fewer than 20 views and that's it. but this old post has consistently seen around 30 hits per week for several weeks now-- I'm still not sure why. is it because phrases like "colonial ruin" "violent displacement" and "racist horribleness" are highly topical these past months? I've let my proper Google analytics account languish without updates for too long, so I don't really have a way to find out.

also about six months ago, I was reading Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. a lush and lovely novel--a braid of stories all about our relationships with land, trees, animals, nature, and each other. biology. ecosystems. extinction or conservation, and all our efforts inbetween.

there is plenty I've so far remembered about this novel, but the thing I've most wanted to blog about here is a pair of sentences in the middle of it. they are sentences about Jewishness and prejudice and history.

Lusa, one of the three point-of-view protagonist characters in this story, is half Polish, half Arab. she marries blissfully into a struggling-but-resourceful family of appalachian tabacco farmers, too soon loses her husband, inherits his parents' old farm house, and faces various tensions and pressures from her local, white, rural in-laws as a result. 

I keep thinking about this line of dialogue from one of Lusa's chapters. she's talking earnestly with the one in-law, a nephew, she feels closest to. 

"That's what I was thinking, too. Families lose their land for a million reasons. My dad's parents had this wonderful farm in Poland, which they lost for being Jewish. And my mother's people got run off their land for not being Jewish. Go figure."

this pair of contradictions struck me, as I read it for the first time in fall of 2023, so much more definitively and potently than it might have at any other time.

and when did Kingsolver write this? my idle curiosity is easily answered: Prodigal Summer was published almost a quarter-century ago. in October, 2000. 

from devouring her other early novels (Pigs in Heaven, Flight Behavior, Unsheltered), I know Kingsolver has a deft way (sometimes subtle, sometimes less so) of commenting on potentially controversial political realities-- like this seemingly endless conflict in the middle east, or like the relative failings of public education, or like the impact of settler colonialism on indigeneous families, or like the nonsensical state of US healthcare systems. 

in October of 2000, I was an almost-17-year-old. what on earth did the words "Israel" or "Palestine" mean to me then? the first I only knew from a bunch of biblical prophecies and hymns, the second from Laurie R. King's A Letter of Mary (1997) and O, Jerusalem (1999), if indeed I'd really heard of Palestine at all. in neither context did I think very critically about what these stories meant. honestly, I was probably quite detached from both versions of the place. their respective peoples. they all may as well have been equally, ineffably, untouchably fictional.

halfway between then and now, I must have seen this rather haunting animation make the rounds on the internet. you've probably seen it, too.

unsurprisingly, there are dozens of new comments on that page since the events of last October.

looking into the piece again this past week, I realized that a full-length film version was produced and likewise donated to the public domain in 2018. do I have the time and spiritual energy to watch it? hopefully someday. (I've also now realized that the artist, as generous as she has been with her artwork, seems to have some not so cool opinions about the social construct of gender, so there is that to grapple with too.) 

{ the Palestinian flag, as if made of butterflies, borrowed from this kind soul on deviantart }
 

being Jewish. 

not being Jewish. 

we might say Lusa's ficitonal comments here are oversimplifying things.

and yes, I'm usually the first to say (to myself if nowhere else) there must be more to it there's so much we don't know how can anyone have a truly worthwhile opinion what's the use in trying to fully understand it anyway it's so complicated and what can I do about it or about anything, little me with my little blog and my little comfortable life?

what's truly oversimplified is any inkling of a thought that this single roundabout post regarding my country's rather terrible, rather unconscionable involvement in the horrors of this geopolitical situation is anything like enough to counter my general day-to-day silence on the topic. 

no matter how many times I might ponder bringing it up to my students or asking all the ROTC cadets how they feel about Aaron Bushnell or posting something to instagram with a hashtag like #CeasefireNow or #GazaWillBeFree... thinking about a few lines from an old Barbara Kingsolver novel and mentally wringing my hands about all the knotted historical roots of this conflict aren't enough at all. 

I don't know what could be enough. write to congress? to the president? just once? or every month? every weekend? with a few pleading letters or phone calls to these more-powerful-than-me people, can I then say I've done my part? 

I don't know. it doesn't seem like it. no number of letters or public protests, and certainly no ocean of hashtags, no matter how many, seems like enough.

so for now, current events continue to sweep across the world, sort of but not really dragging me with them. even so, we are all connected. we are all somehow jointly creating this world. the fact that I'll never be able to single-handedly fix anything on the other side of the planet doesn't mean I can safely give up, right? even if I don't-- or can't-- truly know if my impact on the sprawling web of the universe is leading to more preservation and less extinction of light and goodness, I have to keep trying. 

is it up to me to decide which side of the scale my feet are on? to judge my own quotas of light vs. dark?

for now, it is. I'm the only one who can. am I doing my best?  

August aspirations

goals, of a sort, for the last two weeks of summer break:

sewing. last weekend I cut out pieces for two sundresses and picked apart a long skirt to transform into a third sundress. I also have some trousers to mend and probably a few other random small projects too.

reading. I'm still working my way through the Audre Lorde collection from the library. I also have five tabs open right now that need the attention of my reading brain. (there are usually much more than five, but I'm trying to be realistic and abandon any that have been open for more than a week; I know deep down I won't get around to them anytime soon after all.) one of those tabs is this article, which I've read already but want to plan on rereading every semester for the rest of time, as a reminder that however lazy or unmotivated students may seem, it's more complicated than that. if there's time, I'll also fit in some more short stories from Tor.com, one of the most useful online venues for new and intriguing short fiction that I've come across.

seeing the Grand Canyon. I haven't visited this landmark since I was fourteen, I think. we're just going to make a day of it. drive two hours north. bring snacks. take photographs. indulge in a moment or two of reverence for nature and its grandeur.

writing. even after this month of blogging-every-day is over, I have chapter revisions to work on for an edited collection on user experience research. I have letters of recommendation to write. there are also a few more editing projects to tidy up in the coming weeks, not to mention syllabi and lesson plans. will there be time for fun writing, too? I hope so.

gaming. I completed my second playthrough of Horizon Zero Dawn not long ago. only one irritatingly difficult hunting task was left incomplete. I'm now working on Detriot: Become Human-- a unique sort of game where almost all the choices you make change how the rest of the game goes. yeah, it's got problematic elements, but it's also thought-provoking and intense, which is interesting to me.

of course at some point I also should probably figure out how I want to arrange my new office-- not that I'll be there that often, since in-person office hours are prohibited this semester-- and make sure I'm as ready as possible for teaching three hybrid face-to-face technical/professional writing courses. it's a lot.

but two weeks is also a lot. fourteen days or so. more than three hundred hours. not counting the hundred-ish I'll spend sleeping, that's an abundance of time. hopefully I end up happy with how I use it all. even if I don't officially accomplish all the things I'm presently imagining I might.

more listening

what and who do you find easy to listen to vs. difficult to listen to? I've had reason to ponder this lately, mainly with regard to diversity and tolerance and such. but of course, as I tend to do, I'm getting broad and philosophical about it.

my favourite things to listen to include:

- rainfall

- string instruments

- well-structured podcasts while I'm working with my hands

- chill, lyric-less music while I'm working with my brain

- husband Jeremiah playing the guitar

- vegetables sauteing or sauce simmering on the stove

- soft, gentle pug snoring

there are probably many more that I can't think of right now, too.

sometimes there are voices I get really sick of hearing, or that I'm impatient about listening to. I tell myself that it's not because of the voice itself, but some quality in it or some context around it that makes it insufferable. the ponderous, over-thoughtful droning of too many academic podcasts. the hyper-critical griping of various YouTube reviewer guys. or the two-dudes-talking podcasts that for whatever reason can't seem to edit out even a shred of their blathering (ahem).

I have limited time in my life. I can't be expected to truly listen to everyone. being picky is not a bad thing.

but lately I'm thinking listening as activism. I'm thinking about who we listen to as a crucial moral and political choice. (it isn't always that, I hope, but it can often be that. the personal is political, they say.)

part of what sparked this thinking of late was my slowpokey journey through the Me and White Supremacy workbook. I've been going through each chapter, journaling as earnestly as I can about each prompt (me and tone policing, me and white superiority, me and white silence, and so on). along with a few of the prompts there are a videos from the workbook's author, uploaded back when the book was still just a daily instagram challenge. and the videos are long. some of them are over an hour long.

listening to a stranger talk to me for that long (and about a subject so potentially touchy, at that) takes some discipline. focus. commitment.

in the first section of her book, Layla Saad has said as much. love, truth, and commitment: we won't get through this workbook and its work without those things. and I feel like I need to re-read that section of the book every other day, to help me keep going and stay committed as the discomfort of unpacking all the ways I'm steeped in white supremacy soup intensifies.

listening to a voice that's so different and so passionate isn't easy. the videos that go with the book aren't totally unscripted, but they're conversational. they're personal. it is so easy to say I don't have time for all that.

for me, putting off this set of intense, fine-grained confrontations is convenient. I have every excuse to put it off for next summer or the summer after that, and very little pressure from the outside world to stick with it.

but... as Ms. Saad writes, in address to white people like me and almost everyone else I have ever closely interacted with,

"Whether or not you have known it, [white supremacy] is system that has granted you unearned privileges, protection, and power. It is also a system that has been designed to keep you asleep and 'unaware' of what you having that privilege, protection and power has meant for people who do not hold white privilege. What you receive for your whiteness comes at a steep cost for those who are not white. This may sicken you and cause you to feel guilt, anger and frustration. But you cannot change your white skin colour to stop receiving these privileges, just like I cannot change my black skin colour to stop receiving racism. But what you can do is wake up to what is really going on, challenge your complicity in this system and work to dismantle it within yourself and the world."

there are things I can't change and things I can change.

maybe I can't change my basic inclinations to choose Margaret Atwood's The Testaments off the digital library shelf instead of buying the more 'experimental' Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo's from an airport bookstore. but I for sure can reconsider those basic inclinations and push myself and my brain to include more non-white voices more often. even if (perhaps especially if) those voices seem strange to me.

in this vein of feeding myself more Black voices, I requested some Audre Lorde from the local library the other day. I mostly wanted to read the oft-recommended Sister Outsider, but the copy I found of that collection also included two other works of hers: Zami (semi-autobiographical loveliness) and Undersong (poetry and such). the blurb on the back cover about Zami, the first of the trio, didn't sell it in a way that grabbed me. but as everyone should do with any book they happen to find in their hands, I read the first few lines of it anyway. and it is loveliness. lyrical, thoughtful, evocative, full of allusion and depth and feeling.

previously, the only Audre Lorde I'd ever read was in an Argument Theory class during my first round of grad school: "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." (it might actually have only been a section of it; mainly I remember that we discussed-- fitfully-- whether or not one could discuss an argument's structure and effectiveness without discussing the argument's content). I'm looking forward to reading more of her.

I will keep reading and listening to Layla Saad, too. I've also added the more-conversational-than-I-usually-want-to-tolerate Pod Save the People and the deeply educational and impressive 1619 Project to my podcast queue. is it enough? who knows. it feels like barely, barely enough to be beyond tokenism. it's not likely to be enough to thoroughly crack through all the ways I've been conditioned to prefer and validate white voices over any others.

affection, safety, and a puppy

I learned just today that the German word halten can mean in English to hold or to stop.

this seems profound for some reason. the sentence in my Duolingo German lesson was "die Eltern halten ihr Babies (the parents are holding their babies)" and when my first instinct was to translate that verb as are stopping, I figured I should check the app's hints for it first. they did show both options, but the context seemed to call for are holding instead. depending on the age of one's baby, there aren't that many things you need to or can stop one from doing, really.

if I stop to think for a moment about the same range of meanings in all the history and senses of to hold in English, does that make the whole thing less profound?

the word's etymology is a long one. some snippets that resonate this afternoon:
"to contain; to grasp; to retain"
"to possess, control, rule; to detain, lock up"
"to foster, cherish, keep watch over"
"to keep back from action"

all this potent potential meaning curled up in to hold. and then there are all these phrasal verbs, too: hold back, hold up, hold out, hold off, hold against, beholden to...

to be held as a parent holds a young baby is to be safe. comfortable. cared for. right?

to be held is also to be restrained. controlled. and to be restrained isn't usually considered comfortable, though... right?

or is it?

maybe it is.

paradoxically.

in a "limits are possibilities" sort of way.

I don't remember when exactly this photo is from. September 2016 when we went to the National Zoo? probably. it's been sitting on hold in a blogpost draft for at least three years or so.

to hold also has a sense of continuation. to hold a note. to hold your position. to uphold a ruling. to have and to hold.

sometimes all of that isn't comfortable either. but sometimes it is.

I've been doing this year's 30 days of yoga. it's wonderful even when I don't think I have the time or energy for it-- alternating movement and holding, centering body and mind and breath so all is balanced. not always easy. but it is enough.

I am enough. now is enough. I hope.

in other news-- last week we added to our household a new puppy.

his name is Hamilton.

or, if you're feeling extra fancy, Hamilton Chidi Chewbacca Chesley Alonzo. he's already learned to come when called and to sit on command. Wesley's still warming up to his rambunctious, half-tamed puppy energy, but they're getting along pretty well so far.

what good pugs.

must be seen as

I have been wanting to write something about this newsworthy mess that unfolded in Virginia ever since it happened over a month ago. but what to write? and why? and why now?

my thoughts have needed time to percolate. I still don't know if they are done percolating. is there an ideal thought-percolation time? is there a point at which you have thought enough about something? I kind of don't think so. but probably it depends on what your thinking-goals actually happen to be. are we thinking to do something, or solve something, or...? usually I am thinking for the sake of it, and in that case there is never enough. but I usually have to stop at some point, because only so many things can fit into the whole percolation.

more and more thinking about Charlottesville would also need more and more data about Charlottesville. and while I've been able to get some, there is no way to get it all. I wasn't there. what I have to think with are observations and thoughts that other people have written down on twitter and facebook and other internet spots. such places become the avenues by which I find my news and my sense of newsworthiness. there is so much room in the world for so much news these days. so many stories and voice. this twitter-essay is less directly related to the Charlottesville mess, but it's a story and a message I keep thinking about.

to supply my brain with more informed view, I could, I suppose, listen to more newsy podcasts. or watch some more newsy videos. the podcasts I tend to put on while I wash the dishes are more ponderous, less newsiness. although, in the way of timeliness, 99% Invisible did recently re-run this Memory Palace episode about a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

I don't know if there are any confederate monuments in Indiana anywhere. there is this place, though, just up the road a bit. though it fits the theme of memorials to dead white guys who participated in the general ruination of many, many non-white guys, I don't think anyone is likely to get all enraged about it. I'm not sure though.

it's difficult to think about the complexities of causality and blame. I wonder quite often, what good does blame do? what use is it to spend so much time investigating the precise sources of evils and ills and wrongs and badness, even if we are able to figure it out? does investigating it all make us think we will have any control over the wrong?

maybe just knowing is control enough, in some way. however complex and impossible, we have to try to make things less bad, if we can, right?

sometimes it's hard to see how. sometimes it's easier. sometimes listening is enough. and sometimes listening isn't even that easy.

I've been listening to a few new podcasts lately. Malcolm Gladwell's pet research-and-thinking-aloud project Revisionist History has been a mix of interesting and meh. this very first of the episodes struck me--it's about art and snobbery, patriarchy and sexism, and the concept of "moral licensing." go listen. learning about moral licensing was worth it despite Gladwell's rambling self-important tone.

moral licensing. a justification for keeping all our old and toxic ways of thinking because we spent a little time poking a hole or two in their edges.

so much to think about. I've also been reading a little from a book called Intersectionality. the chapter on how educational institutions play various roles in perpetuating injustice has been thought-provoking for me, now, as I consider my future as a small piece within larger systems of educational institutions. my favourite part of Intersectionality was a quote from Audre Lorde.

"Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependence become unthreatening." (qtd in Collins & Bilge, p. 169)

necessary polarities. necessary and productive difference. no consensus, no flattened-out unity. difference. to see difference differently changes it. is that what Lorde means? that what might be threatening to us if we resist will transform into a beautiful, wonderful thing is we'd just learn to see it that way?

or is it actually that the threat was all in our heads to begin with?

I'm not sure who the we is. hypothetical we. everyone we.

or me and you. maybe. partly.

and then there is the whole paradox of tolerance to grapple with. what belongs in this world we are creating, and what doesn't? what things are okay, and what things are so bad we shouldn't even look at them? think about them?

another random blog I follow

sometimes I wonder why I still follow this silly little mommy-blog-esque blog, but other times I know exactly why. it's posts like yesterday's that make it so delightful and worthwhile.

most of the time Mrs. Lisa Page Rosenberg simply writes up little hilarious excerpts from her life, her son's life, her dog's life, etc. the stories are always short, often clever or quirky, and understatedly real enough to be smile-inducing, without wallowing in sappy mush.

sometimes there are photos, or added reflections, and on Sundays it's always a list of miscellaneous, usually interesting links. there's nothing else quite like it in my blog feed.

my job = reading and writing

today I interrupt my rambly little list of loosely scheduled things-to-review to talk about a book I just finished yesterday. my advisor recommended it for me, and I tracked down the ebook version and began devouring it a few weeks ago. it's called After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, by John Law. it was published in 2004, when I had just barely decided to be an English major.

Law's book was like beautiful blue, sparkly pools of intriguing untanglings of theory, critiques of standardized method, and invitations to crack open a bunch of dusty academic assumptions. he asks why we presume the world to be so definite in its being, so discoverable. he wants more scholars to wander around outside the usual boxes. to "find ways of knowing the indistinct."

not all the books I get to read strike me quite like this one seems to have struck me. reading this book is part of my job as a graduate student scholar-in-training, but it didn't feel like work yesterday. sinking my brain into this book was adventure. like wandering through a mountain forest as the sun comes up.

here, have some quotes I highlighted with digital yellow highlighter:

"...the world is not a structure, something we can map with our social science charts. We might think of it, instead, as a maelstrom or a tide-rip. Imagine that it is filled with currents, eddies, flows, vortices, unpredictable changes, storms, and with moments of lull and calm."

and

"The world could always be otherwise. Can we cope with this?"

in Law's opinion, we can cope, and in doing so we'll be better researchers and better humans. imagining and anticipating the many kinds of otherwise is arguably what makes us human. the capacity for conscious change. that seems important.

one more excerpt, from near the end, beautifully validates a belief I have reached for and reached for my whole life, it seems like.

"The answer, of course, is that there is no single answer. There could be no single answer. And, indeed, it is also that the ability to pose the questions is at least as important as any particular answers we might come up with." 

questions and answers are built together, after all. they are each the spaces that the other stretches into, around, across.

one picture, two

the day is ending with gratitude, somewhat diluted. I am trying not to think so much of myself this weekend.

there was something on the radio this afternoon--something ranty and sermonizing, which tone I didn't like so much, but despite that the something still wriggled into my head with enough weight to feel worthwhile anyway--about how many humans these days seem to forget about their own capacity to create and give. why are we so busy seeking, consuming, winding distractions around ourselves? we could be so much happier-busier in making and working.

it's not so easy, of course. a life cannot be all giving. to create we must also consume. constant see-sawing between input, output. read, write. watch, do.

today I really wanted to make some things. so I got out the typewriter friend Sam gave me years ago, and I threaded in its new spools of ribbon, and I stuck in a little blank notepage, and I mashed its keys for a while, trial-and-erroring until it worked as I imagine it was meant to.

I made a card. tomorrow perhaps I will type a letter to somebody. I have stamps. I have a whole box of stationery-esque materials. this month is even National Letter Writing Month.

letters are not pictures, technically, even if they're a thousand words long.

{ gift shop display case - Museum of Fine Art - Houston }

but typing letters and scribbling pictures both count as production. making, creating, tracing after springtime and the new.

I am trying not to think so much of my self this weekend. this month. maybe I'll send you a letter. or some art. or both.

nineteen: parting

several neat quotes got underlined in my Donna Haraway reading this weekend. the article "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" asks us to think about technological mechanisms and bodies, all the things they share and all the ways they can be jointly understood. here's a snippet:

"...all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life. There is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and machines; there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds. All these pictures of the world should not be allegories of infinite mobility and interchangeability but of elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another's point of view, even when the other is our own machine." (583)

the distance shouldn't, or doesn't have to be alienating. it facilitates possibility. it holds importantly interesting (interestingly important?) texture in the limited but complicated spaces (earth, mortality, the universe) where we all live together.

seven: the study of the true sense

I looked up the etymology of the word etymology a few days ago. and then I remixed that etymology into the title of my last paper-day paper for Postmodernism class. this was last week, at the end of March, which feels very long ago now.

the title was:

"the facts of the origin and development of the true sense of the study of the facts of the origin and development of the facts of…"

and then the rest of the page (legal-sized, remember) blathered on about origins and developments and traces and representations and categories and lines and labels. I read this page to my class as I sat on the floor. to add to the performative interactivity of the whole thing, the copies I'd printed for my classmates had been carefully perforated with the edge of an old pair of scissors. while I read, they could peel and tear and open my legal-sized page into a long, twisty ribbonloop.

to reproduce this page as a blogpost changes it quite a lot. you can't peel these bits and pixels apart the same way you can paper. sorry.

but I can add stuff (like this rambly new preface) and tweak bits of it and take things out that don't fit the new medium here, in a way paper and ink do not quite accommodate. so there's that. you'll have to imagine me on the floor, reading to you. and imagine the feeling of paper tearing in your hands.

---

the etymology of the word perforate takes us back to dear old Latin, as so many etymologies seem to do. via Middle French we arrive at two neat word-trios of infinitive verbs and prepositions: "to bore through.” “to pierce through." pair with these the resulting perforation: "a hole made through something" and that very specific preposition starts to pattern. it’s right there in the per prefix: "through." and it’s implied in the other half too: forare, "to pierce."

the origins and developments of postmodernism... how do those get represented? do they represent themselves? or does someone/something have to step in as representative? we access postmodernism through others’ words and others’ ideas. so far. and even the ideas that cocoon postmodernism are not here in front of us. we can't touch them. we access them through. Saussure through Foucault and Derrida. Foucault and Derrida through Vitanza and Spivak and Berlin. we are looking at a thing (is it a thing?) called postmodernism, but not directly. maybe we’re stuck in a cave. maybe Berlin is putting on a shadow-puppet show. and we are looking at (is it at? along? or into? around? under? which preposition is the best?) an idea called postmodernism through books and essays and art and memes and emoji. we are looking (are we looking?) at this postmodernism mist through our own arguments and faces and looks and voices and brains and time and pencils and paper and chairs and walls and space. does it all become part of postmodernism as we go? I wonder where our lenses and our specimens begin, or end. is there a recipe we can follow when we want to start mixing the message into its medium?

Victor Vitanza, from his article “‘Some More’ Notes, Toward a ‘Third’ Sophistic”:

We have categories so that we might ‘destroy’/’disperse’ them by allowing them to engage in a sophistic-rhetorical ‘diaspora’—that is, to engage in a holiday from any pull toward the infinite or the transcendental—so that we, in turn, might also ‘drift’ freely. We have categorical—‘knowledge,’ as Foucault says, ‘not... for understanding [but] for cutting’ (154). Does perhaps, then, Foucault mean a... ‘cutting loose’? ...does he perhaps mean a ‘drifting’?” (120)

so labels are for peeling very carefully, obsessively, from around the bottles they were glued on. the peeling might ruin them, but it won’t be the end of the world. no worries.

whatever the labels say or don’t say, none of them are neutral. James Berlin is always saying there is no innocent ideology. no innocent pedagogy. no innocence. I should print these introductory and conclusory bits of “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Classroom” on bright posters and hang them in my office someday, I think.

“A rhetoric can never be innocent, can never be a disinterested arbiter of the ideological claims of others because it is always already serving certain ideological claims.” (447)
“Every pedagogy is imbricated in ideology, in a set of tacit assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed.” (492)
“A rhetoric cannot escape the ideological question, and to ignore this is to fail our responsibilities as teachers and as citizens.” (493)

to “not ignore,” I must notice, is not the same as "to answer." good. if we had an answer, we might stop poking and peeling at things. as it is, we might never reach the end of the world. how exciting! we won’t ever run out of ways to represent and re-represent what all this theory is. we might never run out of mist and thought and media to look/wander/aim/drift through. a perforation, after all, only really pierces part of a thing. part way through. you have to show up with your brain and your hands and do the rest of the work.

other people's art

last week most of my colleagues were at the Conference for College Composition and Communication in Florida, and many of them posted snippets of all their inspirational notes from panel sessions and special interest groups and workshops. some of them have collected these snippets from the various social media slots where they started into a more accessible space. Patti's excellent recaps are linked from her blog here. there's also this monstrous box of tangly data. it is slightly less monstrous than this bottomless hashtag pit. and plenty of other attendees have compiled their streams of conference thoughts too.

I did not go to this conference. I went to Kentucky instead. so it's nice to have so much second-hand info about the conference floating about out there. I can look at other people's notes and take what I want from them.

this blogpost is not really about any of that academic adventuring, though. I've been thinking about many other things... the story of my life. the future. solitude. light and trees and footprints and trade-offs. Robert Frost.

these street art photos were taken during a sunny walk many weeks ago. it seems longer-ago than it probably really was. today, winter saw fit to revisit us with a whole day of intermittent flurries. it's been a fairly grey week. these pictures from early March don't match. 

"The best stories take us inside of storytelling so seamlessly, that when we emerge, the impossible is easier to imagine."
— Disgruntled Haradrim (@pdjeliclark) July 30, 2014

Pro Tip: When you like people, tell them you like them. Some people have a hard time believing other people enjoy them and need to be told.
— Hank Green (@hankgreen) March 6, 2015

the twitter-thoughts embedded here originate with various strangers. they've hitched themselves interestingly into my thoughts over the past months and months and months, for one reason or another.

Don’t underestimate the importance of describing “the obvious”. It is meaningful to have the world described in certain, subjective terms.
— PBS Idea Channel (@pbsideachannel) March 24, 2015

“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.” ― Roland Barthes
— Daily Zen (@dailyzen) July 12, 2014

I wonder if it would be cool to plan out a mural or a wall-painting like some of these around town. what colors and shapes would I want to plaster on the side of a building, if I could? what marks would I leave out there for the public to walk beneath? would they tell an intelligible story?

Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.
— Night Vale podcast (@NightValeRadio) January 6, 2015

your story can be about you, of course. but it probably isn't only about you. your voice and your colors are not the only ones telling it. 

the future is mostly a question mark, haunting and deep, but it's not only a question mark. there are a lot of other tracing and tangling lines in it, too.

the world we are creating

if there are things you love on the internet, save copies of them. this is advice that Dr. Sullivan is alway giving us with respect to our wandering research. if you even sort of think you might want to use it someday for an object lesson, class project, seminar paper, conference illustration, or article-fodder, download the thing. as endless and un-erasable as the internet seems most days, the stuff of it doesn't always stay there. you cannot trust the cloud.

(whether you can trust the integrity and/or longevity of your harddrive to any significantly greater extent is a separate though not unrelated question. all is temporary, and the scales of temporariness are complicated.)

if there are people you love on the internet, I don't know what to tell you. so far, there's no way to download people. that's probably a good thing.

early thismorning I saw people linking to a new post by Kathy Sierra. it is a long post, personal, a tad meandering, but it seems everso soul-questioningly, heart-wrenchingly important.

read it. go on. I've linked to it twice now, redundantly, asking you to read this long meandering story even if you have not been a Kathy Sierra fangirl since at least 2005, and even if you have no clue who this Andrew Auernheimer fellow (hm... he blogs on livejournal. how old-fashioned...) might think he is, and even if you, like me, find life much more effective without worrying very much about the hopeless-seeming, headache-inducing state of the universe.

Sierra's post might not be there very long. I have made a copy of it, in case the original disappears. it's also on Wired, for the moment. (if Wired and Dropbox disappear, who knows what we shall do).

two-thirds in, Sierra shifts into saying we. "This is the world we have created."

not only does that make us sound so implicated, so conspiratorially close to culpable... it also makes us sound so finished. so final. we've hit send. we've checked enough boxes. the world has been published. editing is over and this is the product we're stuck with.

not so. please, not so. I'd rather say "this is the world we are creating."

the we is still there. I don't see any ways of getting around that we, though parts of me are tempted to pick we apart and subdivide it into some sort of graph with axes like experience, influence, responsibility, investment, and such.

all the other words could stand to be picked at too. which exact this? creating how?

in one of those neat serendipitous internet moments, the following video was posted today. Mr. Rugnetta says a few things on cultural (re)production that answer that last question. the how is discourse. pens, not swords. writing and media, not sticks or stones or construction equipment. it's actions too, of course, but what we say about how we act, and how we storify things that happen = way incredibly powerful. Sierra's story similarly notes that stories with enough inertia and spin can permanently warp one's perspective. even the most disturbingly inaccurate stories, like the kind you might hear about scaly, murderous llamas, can stick in your head and tint everything you see. all the Pratchett you've ever read will say the same thing--narrativium is not to be trifled with.

I wonder sometimes if the stories we tell about the stories we tell carve ruts as deep or as damaging. those are thoughts for future blogposts, I think.

as long as I'm being redundant today, I'm going to include another video--yes, more of this silly Rugnetta fellow and his ponderings. it's relevant, I promise. and the followup comments/responses over here are also enlightening and chewy. (my brain has been particularly hung up over the 8:40 mark. it's a part of me that's been trained to meekly accept and swallow all things as somehow divinely-permitted-side-effects-of-this-fallen-mortal-experience-which-will-ultimately-all-work-together-for-my-everlasting-good that wants to say, "yeah, shrug off those death threats, everything will be fine." what does that mean? who does that make me? am I supposed to squash this attitude? or unravel it away? maybe all I can do is wait to see how I actual feel when or if death threats are ever made in my direction, and keep my mouth shut about the concept until then.)

anyway. this whole situation--trolls, women, internet, life--is more than a story. we can uses stories and conversations and videos and blogs to reach out for little parts of it, and build what we see into some sensible structure, with sections and headings and terms lined up for convenient deconstruction. but labels make me squirm, generally. what we mean by troll and or victim obviously isn't easy. it's not even always useful. the definitional blurriness between criticism/harassment is another thing that might deserve plenty of more discussion. my own experiences of such things aren't the same as anyone else's. that's why we need to tell the stories, after all. that's why we invented ways of sharing all the crazy insides of our heads.

maybe all this talking and thinking will help. somehow.

hey you

wave is both a noun and a verb. the verb came first, it seems. 

I was thinking about when and why waving (particularly the happy, smiling, hey-you kind of waving) happens. all the possible contexts for waving won't fit in my head. I know the happy kind isn't the only kind. you could wave as a warning, as either hello or goodbye, or as a call for help, or a directional gesture.

but my thinking was mostly about happy, hey-you waving and strangers.

it seems a rare thing to wave happily and inconsequentially at strangers. a rare thing to wave and nothing more--no subsequent greeting or gathering or inquiry or discussion. only waving.

first, this kind of waving requires and responds to a certain amount of distance. to wave wordlessly without seeming creepily, stalkingly silent and strange needs an excuse of several meters. you must be far enough away to make shouting either ineffective or impolite, if not both.

movement seems necessary, also. to simply wave at strangers while otherwise motionless would need some other excuse, or perhaps even greater or loftier distances. at least one party involved in this exchange of waving should be on their way from somewhere to elsewhere.

are those the only two most basic requirements? or are there others? perhaps certain forms of transportation warrant random waving more than others. trains and boats come to mind more fittingly than skateboards or airplanes, definitely. perhaps the weather or the time of day might also make some difference. I'm not sure.

but whatever the perfect mix of circumstances is, sometimes there are moments for this waving-at-strangers: fleeting little isolated situations where there is no need for anything else. maybe no need to wave, either, really. but why not?

to wave with no reason other than the sake of human solidarity. it seems nice. maybe even an instinct...

it felt sort of like an instinct, at least, on our boat trip to the Isle of May a few weeks ago. it was our penultimate day in Scotland. we waved as we pulled away from the dock in Anstruther. we waved to passengers on a small speedboat, too. we waved to the National Nature Reserve volunteers when we left the island that afternoon. and we waved to a passing fishing boat on our way back.

everyone waved back.

I guess I don't know for certain that these strangers had no acquaintance on board the May Princess that day, but it didn't seem likely. the chances of anyone on a boatful of tourists actually knowing anyone outside of that boat in the middle of the gaping mouth of the Forth River can't be very much.

yet it seemed so nice to wave, in transit as we were that day, to the island and back.

that wave is both a verb and a noun reminds me of the event-ness of all objects, and of paradoxes. both noun waves and verb waves imply a back and forthness, or up and downness... an instability and yet a repeating, measurable frequency... movement, but usually in patterns. are there reasons for the patterns? is there meaning in this merry-go-round of back and forth and up and down? will we come, someday, to an explanation?

maybe no. but maybe we only need the waves themselves. maybe the fact that we can see the pattern at all is enough for reassuring ourselves of some worthwhile slivers of human solidarity underneath it.

me and mine

several weeks ago I had my students read and respond to these two online pieces: Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Cultural Appropriation by (which also has a part two) and But Why Can't I Wear a Hipster Headdress?

each puts up a different perspective on how the average consumer might consider and deal with instances where culture seems not to belong to the people who are making use of it. where it seems like these colorful, textural, symbolic wrappers we wrap our identities in get stolen. or at least thoughtlessly borrowed. to be bought and sold.

the boundaries between cultures and subcultures and groups are complicated. the beginning to a recently reposted episode of This American Life includes an interview with Jared Diamond (who incidentally is the author of a short essay my Texas Tech students had the option of writing about a whole year and a half ago) on the subject of groups and the costs of inclusion. and exclusion. no man is an island and all, so this stuff is important. belonging and contributing are both important.

the value of these things isn't exactly quantifiable. it's hard to measure all the tradeoffs and sacrifices and perks that get thrown around in any arrangement of human beings (or any living organism, come to that). these things don't have price tags, usually.

this fashion piece does. so do memberships to things and applications for citizenship.

membership and belonging don't seem quite the same though. and monetary costs are not the only kind. does wearing a fancy headdress make you a member of a certain group? or do a certain lifestyle and certain shopping habits even moreso? paperwork and legal distinctions might hold lots of weight, but can those things reflect the essence or core of any nationality?

belonging could be a matter of action rather than of paperwork or decree. yeah? but then I want to ask whether acting and being are the same. impostors and decoys and spies say of course not. Jared Diamond's bit explains that well enough.

so my next idea is that belonging, being included, is a relationship. nobody can belong anywhere without both action on their part plus a reaction of some sort on the part of the group. this of course seems pretty fundamental--a group defines itself through such relationships. members of a group have to be related somehow, even if only spatially or by the colors of their shirts. but I don't only mean that kind of relationship. we're all related some way or another through such abstractions. that's too easy.

the groups that seem to matter more are groups that make us negotiate our way into them. they ask things of us. they have conditions.

in a few hours, I'm going to join the group of people (how many are there, I wonder?) who are currently hanging out in the state of Utah. when I get there I'll sleep for a bit before being stolen away for a star-gazing camping trip down in the canyony, National-Park-ridden southern bits of the state. I have plenty of more thoughts to spin out about groups and requirements and ownership, but the conditions of my getting to Utah include getting in line to board an airplane just about now. we'll continue this blogpost somehow later on...

friday, afternoon, sunny

I was going to blog this week about how two weeks ago I was losing sleep over a ridiculous little four-page essay on Roman law and modern rights of authorship...

but then, just today, as I walked from campus over to the crazy-eclectic book/music/clothing/knick-knack shops to see if they would be able to sell me a pitch pipe, I witnessed an unusual-to-me encounter and immediately began reformulating its colors and sounds and emotions into a written account. what good will it do to write this down? I don't know. maybe none. maybe only some fraction of imagined documentary-esque good.

a shiny, bright red sports car, a white-skinned polo-shirted boy leaning on its horn. I still cannot discern why on earth he felt the need to honk so impatiently.

there is shouting. I stop and turn to watch the black vehicle (vanity license plate, ending with a very hip Z) in front of him slow way way down. both drivers' side windows are open to facilitate enjoyment of the gorgeous weather as well as an exchange of offensive gestures. shouting. red sports car guy grumbles, gestures, shouts, "you f#&%ing terrorist."

the other driver stops. as he gets out of his car I note his skin color in a way I hadn't noted it before. a very deep caramel. "did you call me a terrorist?" he yells, striding aggressively just close enough to sports-car-guy to be threatening. all traffic has stopped. nobody tries pulling around this confrontation. denial: "no--just go, I said. go!" more shouting. I almost consider rushing across the two lanes of asphalt between me and these men, wondering whether if I could look them in the eyes, their behavior would make more sense to me. what could I say, to make this situation not horrible? I watch the insulted, slurred ethnic minority growl and demand an apology, which prompts a hasty, impatient "I'm sorry, alright, just--" and behind the red sports car is a city bus, whose driver has begun rapping on his big, flat windshield.

I turned back to my sidewalk and traffic swept the whole thing away from me then. it wasn't so long ago and not much else has happened since then (Vons does not sell pitch pipes, after all), but I already doubt my memories. understand that the above is admittedly less than pure accuracy. it might not have been a polo shirt. that kid may have been wearing a baseball cap. caramel may not be the best skin-color analogy. the bus driver may have been a woman.

I hesitate to call this whole event shocking. it has its profoundly, poignantly upsetting side. it has its intricately incomprehensible side. but going another forty minutes back in time would put me chatting with officemate Jen (she has a blog too!) about the conversation she'd just had with some students, on McCarthyism and The Crucible and the reality of modern-day fear mongering. one student proposed that we must be better than that now--today we don't irrationally judge entire groups of people or let anxiety or stereotypes dictate how we treat them, how we talk about them. Jen had to set this student straight, she told me, and as she was talking I only had to think for a split second about which groups we as a country and society are so afraid of now. maybe it should be shocking, but it isn't.

faults or credits

last week on a somewhat breezy Wednesday, I finished my class conferences, threw my notebooks and things in a bag, and walked across the street toward the hair salon I'd seen from the bus that morning. the receptionist asked if I'd need my hair dried and styled, unsure if there would be time between already scheduled appointments--but I said no, I hate hair dryers. so she sat me down in front of a very large mirror.

after some combing and sectioning and chatter, she cut off an eleven inch braid. the rest got trimmed very neatly, layered a bit, and thinned out enough to get me through the last few weeks of this humid Indiana summer. I'm going to mail the snipped off braid to these people and hope it ends up being useful to a wig-maker somewhere.

the last time my hair was anywhere near this short was in sixth grade. 1996 or so? yeah. a neighbor lady had volunteered to cut a more ambitious style than my mum (the usual hair stylist back then) had been willing to inflict, I suppose. I ended up with a bob around my ears, probably some fringe in front. pretty much the only thing I've remembered about that haircut, in all the years since, has been one cruel comment from a boy in my orchestra class. he said it looked as if some fuzzy creature had died on my head.

is that teaspoon of insult the reason I never again (until now) got my hair cut so short?

strangely (is it strange? you tell me) until just now as I wrote out this story (a story I've glossed in many casual self-deprecating conversations with dozens of friends. probably a third of you reading this have heard some version of it before), I always assumed that kid was right. I bought and swallowed that one-line comment completely. what that nameless sixth grade boy said about my hair must have been true.

and now that I am thinking back to all the times I've told the story and the excuses I've tacked on to it. usually I say something about my naive sixth-grade self, who hadn't figured out how to handle her mass of thick dark brown curls, so frizzing and crazy. that girl hadn't heard of mousse. all she knew was ponytails and those flippy triangular metal clip things. she couldn't french braid her own hair. she hadn't developed her current fondness for ribbons. she didn't quite know who she was.

that sixth-grade bob probably did look like something dead. I almost can't imagine it any other way, having attached everything about that haircut to one boy's probably thoughtless comment. no other reality has thus far existed in my head. nothing outside that moment of insult is still around for me to use as a framework for the memory.

of course, outwardly, I shrugged off that moment and went on to finish sixth grade, move away, learn many things, and grow my hair out again. at some point I started waiting longer and longer in between haircuts. I let almost anyone take scissors to it when it started really needing a trim (upstairs dorm friends. sisters. cosmetology students. my hair is not picky.)--and by now I've learned that all my hair really needs is daily washing, a bit of mousse, and space. maybe from time to time it still looks like a monster. oh well.

I do not want to say my everso precious self-image as a sixth grade girl was awfully damaged or ruined by this carefully remembered comment.

I'm just thinking and questioning, suddenly, the ways other people's expressed perceptions--and the expectations and standards of beauty or professionalism or appropriate grooming or whatever ingrained sense of propriety--are and have been shaping the way I remember this moment of my life and the way I have always told this story. how fascinating it is that I built a reality around that insult. I justified it, joined in, looked back with pity on my sixth-grade incompetence and laughed it off, blaming myself for eliciting insults from sixth-grade boys. without even knowing how serious a comment he meant it to be, without even giving room in my head for anyone else's opinions from that year, I made it all the haircut's fault. by extension, my fault. I had trusted that well-meaning neighbor with her hair scissors. if only I hadn't been so inexperienced, no insult would have been warranted. as it was, the insult somehow became a completely valid thing.

how have I never thought about this til now?

what if he was wrong?

I'm not saying he was. if he saw in my glorious mess of brown frizz something dead, okay.

but suddenly I'm pretty sure that's not the only way to look at the world, or my head, or anything else.

he, whoever he was, may have been unreasonably and intentionally mean. he may have been more simply thoughtless and blunt. I don't know.

in revisiting this whole account here, I also do not want to say that insults are never called for or should never happen. free speech, right? you are very welcome to hate my haircut. you are welcome to have fun imagining what kind of deceased thing it most resembles. I probably won't even mind much if you share your opinion.

I just hope that from now on I'll think before I rearrange my memories so I'm at fault for your dislike. the corollary to this, you realize, is that I can't take much credit for your approval either. if anything, the hairdresser at that salon on the corner, she deserves most of the praises for my haircut this time. or we could thank my parents, their genes, and biology. or the physics that make my hair fall this way or catch the light just so. it doesn't matter.

sixth and wall

I bought my meager bits of furniture from some of the nicest people. they delivered all of it to my house. they were friendly and sent good vibes in the direction of my future crazy life. the people who sold me the nice sofa even invited me to their church down on 4th street, Sundays, nine o'clock a.m. I may go check that out sometime, though I told them nine o'clock a.m. seemed very early for a Sunday.

this is my scuffed little kitchen table. I took these photos before I started piling books and notebooks and papers and pens and bottles and various other knick-knacks upon its surface. today it is quite cluttered, and will probably remain that way unless I decide to throw a dinner party. which would be very cool.

classes started yesterday. it's kind of thrilling, all these navigation of new people, new responsibilities, new space, and new furniture. nothing is perfect. but all the scuffs give it great character, don't you think?

we

there are no closed systems. everything influences everything else. all of us play roles in all the others' lives. the cast and the script and the plot and the setting are all so complex we can hardly fit the hugeness of it in our brains. so intricate our explanations, synopses, always feel thin and stretched.

we try anyway. we want to tell stories with our lives. we want there to be a beginning, a middle, and an end.

but when that doesn't work out, at least we can tell stories about our lives. we can carve our memories into neat narratives. I am one of the guiltiest. or am I? sometimes I look for the story before a moment has time to become a memory. sometimes I start hunting for the perfect description of this or that event before it is even over. before I have even crossed through it. I start bending my experience through some kind of lens as soon as I can think to, as if pinning the glory of now into some evokative, poetic phrase will make it keepable somehow. as if boxing each tiny split second into place as part of a meaningful chain of events will make it easier to leave the past behind.

I don't think it's bad to turn our lives into stories. I'm not sure what our reasons are, exactly (a way to hold on to slippery moments? a method of honoring the ever-changing present?), but we seem to like stories a lot. true stories, fantasy stories, short stories, epic stories. something in them can be incredibly engaging. addicting, even. storytelling is a very human, very beautiful pastime.

last weekend, I watched The Fall. friend Melanie had painted it so invitingly and gorgeously, as she tends to do with films, and I looked forward to seeing it. Melanie has excellent, well-justified taste, in my opinion, at least. The Fall was just as lovely as she made it seem.

the trailer:

all of it was great. for me, the most intense, tear-jerking point arrives when the little girl, with bandaged head and a face full of frustration, asks, "Why are you making everybody die?" (the clip at 1:45 shows the line, if you're curious.)

in response, Roy says to her, "It's my story!"

she responds, "Mine too!"

and then you know it isn't only the story they're talking about. it isn't only the silly imaginative story these two have shared, but life. it's not only the plot of his fiction Roy has partially surrendered to this young girl, it's the plot of his own existence. she has a stake in him, now. he can't pretend his actions won't affect her. friend Melanie linked to this analysis in her review, which picks at this idea a bit more. stories. lives. neither of these things can ever be single-author creations, no matter how pervasive the myth of independent, solitary genius. nobody can be the sole creator of anything, can they?

whether we are storytellers or story-consumers, to be in a place of so much power--with so much freedom to see and re-see the world and yet to still be obliged to make affordances for others and their visions--takes a massive, almost paradoxical sort of balancing act. our own imaginations are capricious enough, I think. who knows what someone else is going to re-imagine our stories? we can't predict exactly--but we know it's going to happen. that's part of the magic and the risk.

everything influences everything else. is it butterfly effect, or just particle physics, or what? and is this always true, even in stories? maybe not. but to quote friend Melanie about The Fall: "The genius of the story is when Alexandria pushes her way into it and we wonder how much influence she can exert, paralleling her influence over Roy, himself. The story is both a symbol and a product of the relationship between these two people." nobody owns the story. nobody can force anyone to read it the same way. it kind of reminds me of this old post talking about books as meeting places (or battle grounds). if stories are ways of drawing lines around the chaotic things that happen, ways of making sense of life itself, then the conventional ways of building stories and interpreting stories matter a lot. luckily none of it is completely set in stone.

and if we can say there is magic and risk in sharing a story--in putting it out there to be imagined and re-imagined beyond our control-- then how much more magical and risky is living a life? one life, co-authored in concert with a million other lives?

what are the lyrics of that Incubus song again?

sometimes you cannot see the traffic lights. the other cars get in the way, or there are glares from the late afternoon sun, or you've come to a stop at just the right angle behind a large truck.

this happens to me and probably to everyone. who knows why I have been noticing and thinking about it so much lately.

when you cannot see the traffic lights, you can also not see when they turn green again.

and since you cannot see them turning green, you are left to trust the traffic around you. if that truck in front of you moves forward, and the cars in the next lane are moving too, then you probably needn't wait to look at the light above that intersection. it is probably, at last, green.

all of this seems very allegorical.

doesn't it?

a few days ago I was struck that there is a difference between observable events and observed events. the things that happen may not be the things that I see happen. I cannot see everything. even if I and the collected world around me try--even if all of us tried to look and watch and measure and record the things we see happening, there will still be gaps between what we see and the whole of what is real.

maybe being aware of that gap helps somehow. but it also seems so wobbly, wandering around with flaws in our perception that as far as we know cannot ever be jettisoned.

so is all we can do look around, remembering the patterns in the lights we've learned so far, and trust the general direction of the traffic in the next lane? is that good enough?

(I wanted to include some driving pictures in this little post. maybe I'll come back and add them if I find the adapter card for taking photos off my camera-phone.)

tenses, tinted

not quite nine years ago (apparently long enough ago that I was still capitalizing my sentences as a rule), I went out and decided to put a bit (just a bit) of dye in my hair.

I think it cost me £25 or so.

I came home (which was at the time a lovely flat above 101 Victoria Avenue) and I wrote something like the following exercise in creative autobiography, which is strangely in third person and present tense. what was I thinking?

nine years ago one of my pet names for myself was 'the muse.' friend Chris has recently proclaimed that he misses this persona a little. and so, for really no reason at all, here is a brief resurrection, of sorts:


The muse is late for her appointment. She apologizes and waits for Charlie, the girl who is scheduled to mess with her thick brown locks, to finish a few less important tasks. The magazines on the little table are full of shockingly unconventional hairstyles. The girl tries not to let herself get to nervous. There are huge mirrors in this hair salon, huge and clean, just like there are in every other hair salon. She sits down in front of one, having discussed one particular coppery bronze colour mere moments previous. Charlie, who has bright blue extensions in her own hair, breaks out the straighteners and proceeds to iron all the frizz out of the muse's hair. Surprisingly, it works. The muse might have to get herself some of those, for the next time she wishes her hair were straight.

All of her long, thick tresses are now being combed and split up into sections. Charlie's boss is giving her a few bits of advice, commenting on how thick and long this hair is, and how therefore it will need more color than usual. More segmenting and numerous clips are involved, and Charlie begins. It is a slow process. The dye looks purple as she brushes it into the little bits of the sectioned hair. The muse watches in the mirror, and thinks about how she looks. She is hating her smile.

Charlie asks her about herself, what she studies, how she's enjoying the hot weather. More and more hair is slathered with purple goo. Hours go by. Charlie is tired. The first three months of pregnancy are supposedly the most exhausting. Charlie is only eighteen. Segments of hair are rearranged, parted, clipped up. This would all take far less time if Charlie weren't only a trainee hairdresser. As it is, she works very slowly. The muse doesn't mind. The muse is saved from boredom by her own random thoughts, interspersed with hairdresser chit-chat and also what Charlie calls 'naff radio'--because the television, sadly, is broken.

The muse watches the other hairdressers in the mirror. One of them stops and considers Charlie's work. What can she see? Trying to imagine how the muse must look from their positions is an amusing diversion, but an impossible one. The faces in the mirror, including her own, are backwards. She thinks... even if I were looking at my own head from up there, would what I saw be the same as what Charlie sees? The muse will never know. She is not Charlie. She never will be Charlie. If she were Charlie, she would not be she, and that just wouldn't make sense. Still, she tries to imagine being pregnant at eighteen, with a boyfriend and a full time job.

Impossible.

--

as a postscript to the original entry, I added, "Refracting the whole thing from the memory that it is back into a present tense narrative was a bit interesting. I've gone and broken it now though. My hair still smells a little like dye."

a week or so later I flew back to America and started readjusting to the crazy spaciousness of it.

everyone, including the muse, is wondering where I'm going to go next.

{ photo borrowed from this kind soul on flickr }