everything that rises must converge.

I recommend watching this video at night. By yourself. In the dark. With no one around.


Bat For Lashes - Whats a Girl To Do

stick with it, it only gets weirder.


and

just because its beautiful.

Sia - Breathe Me


and

Pharoache Monch - Push

How'd you ever get the Devil to dance.

BBC NEWS South Asia Benazir Bhutto killed in attack

: /

Benazir Bhutto was assassinated this morning; the world is really just fucked sometimes.

I truly wanted to write a happy, light-hearted post, since it's the holidays. Unfortunately, the world does not stop for the Christ's birthday. The bad shit doesn't stop getting cranked out, even while kids are asleep in their beds, waitin' on presents, and a made-up man in a red velvet suit (hope there are no kids reading this, ha ha. SURPRISE!).

I don't think I'm a particularly negative or pessimistic person. I continually hope. I hope that things can get better, I hope that the world can find some spark of sanity, and that it catches and starts a three-alarm uncontrollable fire of human decency.

Last night, my 13 year old brother was talking about wanting to be a lawyer. I'm pretty sure I wanted to be a vet, or a scuba-diver or some shit when I was 13. What I mean is, next he'll want to be a genie or a spray paint artist or a monkey trainer or whatever rotating series of careers are desirable to a teenage boy (skateboarder? surgeon?). But last night he wanted to be lawyer, and was throwing all kind of prosecutin'-prefixes in front of his name:
A.D.A. D.A. Attorney at Law.
My parents asked him what he would want to do as a lawyer.
I don't know... be a prosecutor? Work with detectives? Some Law and Order stuff? Public Defense?
As soon as he said public defense my parents suggested corporate law...
Yeah, I guess I could do corporate law.
I don't know... maybe I'm the crazy radical older sister who goes away to college and ends up coming back with half a crew cut and 3 new piercings and a whole slew of impractical ideas about how the world works.

Dear Gabe,
Please don't become a corporate lawyer. I know you probably won't anyhow, but I want you to remember this moment, because this is the only decent advice I have to offer to you: Do something to help the world. You're only 13, but we've lived New York, so maybe you can kind of already see how messed up the world is and how many problems there are. I'm not trying to scare you, but there will always be unimaginable suffering and pain, and seemingly unsolvable problems, and things so fucked up that you want to look away from it. But please don't look away from it, look back at it, and decide that you want to at least try. You're one of those crazy-smart kids who is born genuinely caring about others without an ounce of selfishness. And that's so fucking rare. So please become someone who helps change the world, if that's even possible; don't be the gun-firer, the tank-driver, the 2.5 kids in the suburbs man. Please don't sell your soul to make it big in America. You'll regret it; maybe not right away, but one day you'll look back and wish you were Lot's wife. You don't understand what that means, but you will one day. I love you, please don't brush this off, but really listen to me. I'm asking you to make a hard choice. I'm asking you to give up on other futures you could have, on alternate lives which would be easier, and take less effort and thinking, and I'm begging you to take the harder road, the road where nothing is easy and there isn't much reward for living it. Not many people can walk it; I can't even do it sometimes and I want to give up and just paint for a living. I get exhausted trying to understand the intricacies of the human condition, and I think sometimes I exhaust others because of it. But I really try and I want you to try too; selfishly, one day years from now when I'm exhausted by this I want to look over and see you working for it too. Maybe nothing will get better in our lives, but I retain the hope that maybe, maybe, it will. So please, don't be a corporate lawyer.

Love,

Your sister.




I don't mean for this letter to be some artificially-made devastatingly poignant moment. I just watched him think about lawyers and remembered a letter I got, once, a really long time ago, that changed me. And I think, most of the time, even when I'm scared and really fuck up shit, that I'm doing the right thing, in the end.

Protest Songs / in response to Military Aggression / Protest Songs / to try to stop the soldier's gun.

Felt not Heard-

Felt not heard
has been joined by
smelled not touched.


You wrapped me in your sweater
to keep the cold off of my bones
on the solo ride home.
Its an ugly rag,
but you better believe I slept with it
wrapped around my chest;
cause it’s the closest I’ll get this life around.


& I’m trying to dance w/ impossibility,
I’m trying to swoon drunk w/ the hum
you slip through my ribs.
but your generosity, accurate and free
sets my home awake
and a little too close to on fire.




It all started when I told you I’d been here 32 days
It all started when I asked you to turn up your bass
so I could grasp your voice
and the metaphor began;
“A good bass player should be felt, not heard”


Your notes, your steel sliding fingers
your goofy ass patentable grin
tickle that fine line
felt / heard


Music is dangerous.
sound waves don’t see skin as solid,
they reach through and shake
each little atom, one by one,
& whether or not you like that trembling
you have been changed.


And I just want to hear you,
I just want my fingers on you
my mouth, here and now
Fuck this dream state bullshit.


But what can I do?
we are cast off different homes,
you are wrapped in older skin,
still, I can’t stop feeling you.


- Samantha Barrow

I fear no man / I know wrong from right / We push until the day we see the light. / and we keep on pushin, pushin, pushin...

PART I.

I don't really know where to launch into this from. But I have to just do it. I've been meaning to write about identity for a while... but every time I try to cut the extraneous bits of the conversation away, I can't do it. I want to write something witty, or succinct, or unshallow, but I'm not really sure I can.

There isn't any way for me to write some amazing entry about identity, because it can't be wrapped in a neat little package and tied up with a cute little bow. I have, by no means, gotten my mind around what identity even means. Besides the fact that understanding your own identity is ... the penultimate struggle of our lives, or something epic-sounding like that. [Part of it is also part of a confidence game – admitting you question things about you identity implies you haven't figured out who you are, which is seen as dangerous and awkward. But I guess I have to let go of both of those things and just do it, or I'll never get anywhere in understanding it.]

I will start by saying: I have a hard time making decisions. Its a truly complex particular breed of indecisiveness. I've stated this previously, and I don't mean to repeat myself, but recently I've wondered if indecisiveness is a much bigger issue than I give credit to. Not just with me, but with a whole culture of people. And I guess it goes further than indecisiveness, even the aggressive strain I seem to have. It crosses over into the world of commitment to identities and to labels.

I don't like being simplified, or simplifying other people. I value complication and complexity; I don't like multiple choice questions, one word answers, all-inclusive titles... I don't like being simplified.

As teenagers, and as children, and generally as human beings who are raised and educated by other human beings, we are taught to define ourselves as much as possible. We are taught to learn the categories that exist, and fit ourselves into them. In the process of doing that we receive a lot of mixed messages. A lot of conflicting ideas about who we're supposed to grow up and be. There's who our parents want us to be. Who our culture wants us to be. Who our friends want us to be. And then, eventually, who we want to be.
But who do we want to be? Even that sentence doesn't really make any sense. It implies that we wake up as one day as a finalized, categorized product. Which, as a culture (and as a subjects of social psychology) we want to perpetuate: we need to codify everything, so we know how to respond.

Everything is categorized, and then you have to pick one. Black and white, one or the other. As little kids it was: you are a girl or a boy. OK, you're a girl: here are your options for how to be a girl. (Not like anyone really has a choice there. Or at least when we're younger, gender doesn't appear to be optional.)

We get older, and find out that maybe there are more options present. You can be the subversive but sexy girl, but you have to be her in a certain way. You can be the 'tom-boy' girl-next-door, but you have to be her in a certain way. Even the “alternative” female identities have to fit into a certain status-quo.

At Hampshire we get it beaten into our heads that identity based qualifiers are on a spectrum. Gender is a spectrum; sexuality is a spectrum. But as much as we're taught that, I still see an intense pressure to conform to new identities present within Hampshire's insular communities. And Hampshire is pretty progressive... outside of Hampshire, its “Are you gay?”. Then once that answer is established, maybe its “Are you a lesbian?”, and if the person is really direct: “Are you femme?”. So I'm led to believe that once you “decide” that being queer is part of your identity, then you're supposed to find a way to fit in again. Early theory of homosexuality was dependent on lesbians being masculine and gay men being feminine. Are we really that divorced from that idea?

If I don't consider myself a lesbian, I don't consider myself butch, I don't consider myself femme, but does that mean I give up my right to be considered? Then when, exactly, is the tipping point when I'm considered queer enough to call myself that? To me, this mindset is just a whole other kind of binary.

This is from from NYMagazine, about Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School teens: (http://nymag.com/news/features/15589/index6.html):
“These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it.”
“But kids are... in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.” The terms are designed less to achieve specificity than to leave all options open.”
The article seems undecided whether Stuyvesant's small sexuality sub-culture is immature or just different; are they radically changing sexuality's definitions, or just not committing to a sexual identity out of uncertainty?

It's never been a conscious effort on my part to reject definition, it just happens. I just don't feel like being reduced to single descriptive words. A refusal to be defined became part of my identity. But at the same time, I always wonder... can an undefined identity be a legitimate identity? Or, in some way, is identifying as non-defining simply symptomatic of my generations inability to commit?
Is refusing to commit to an identity, actually because I'm scared to own it, or because I'm indecisive? If that's true, then am I not owning parts of myself? Or not owning parts of cultures that I'd want to be a part of?
By claiming no label, do I forfeit the right to be certain things, or to participate in certain cultures? As far as gender is concerned, am I not “feminine enough” to be a woman, but not “masculine enough” to be a man? Or as far as sexuality is concerned, am I not “lesbian enough” to be considered queer, but not “straight enough” to be considered heterosexual? Perhaps then, non-definition is just reactionary to not fitting into any of those categorizations.

[A note: Gender identity and sexual orientation/identity are not the same. I'm not lumping them together except for my own writing ease to address them both simultaneously. I'm also not addressing cultural, class, racial identity right now either, because there are only so many hours in the day.]

If we could strip away all the messages society has shoved down our throats, the words that have defined us throughout our lives, the people who dictated what we were, all the times we masqueraded as people we wanted to be, or thought we should be: if we could strip down to the core of who we are:

Who would that be?

Its almost too ridiculous to comprehend: with those external layers peeled away, definitions and words don't mean anything. But the ideas behind them would still exist. So who are we, then?

The problem is, our identities aren't created in a vacuum. Our identities are all wrapped up in the outside factors. Not only that, but its essentially impossible to exist without context. We only understand ourselves by what exists around us.



And then... at a certain point, when my face is an inch away from someone else's face, all of this stops mattering. And I have to put it to rest and say: fuck it... Theory ends here.

last night, she said.

from Blissful Times, Sandra Alland
THE TERRIFYING NATURE OF INTIMACY:


what in his language meant

hello

in hers meant death squad

and when he said

love
she heard disappeared

i listen and drive while you talk.

The things about writing (about all art really) is that when you start to feel pressured to produce it, it becomes a chore. And once I feel that pressue, I start to feel guilty, and resentful, and then I pretty much just avoid it.

Like this blog.

But I'm not just speaking about writing. Its in everything... once we feel like there's obligation involved, its like we're children who've just been told that there won't be any dessert till we finish our broccoli. We freak the fuck out.

I'm not trying to eloquent here, because I'm mentally exhausted and I just don't have the time. I'm also not angry or upset, I'm just being honest. Recently, it seems like honesty has become a very complex topic in my life. Its both a heavy burden and an answer that I'm searching for.

You know that point in a movie, where the character is about to open the door, or peak inside the box, or look in the envelope? Right before they do, there's always a moment... a moment where as a viewer, you know that everything is going to change once they cross that threshold. You want to stop them, prevent them from experiencing what every movie-goer knows is going to be a difficult journey. There will probably be pain. There might be even worse things around the next corner.

I want to call this the truth-threshold.
"Do I want to know, or do I not want to know?"
More often than not, the age of computers and instant access to information means we cross that threshold. Almost always, we see the line and we run straight across it.

And we end up knowing, perhaps, too much. We end up knowing things that maybe we shouldn't know. For human beings, having all the answers gives us too much power. Its more than we can handle. We overthink situations that haven't even happened based on information we shouldn't even have.

I'm not advocating that we don't ask questions... I'm simply pointing out that there's not much value in the answers if we get them so quickly and so effortlessly. Or maybe I'm pointing out that the answers we get aren't answers at all -- its only temporary. Its a convenient truth.

Its the equivalent of having a remote control that fast-forwards in high-speed. Freeze frame: the character is about to open that door. Fast forward: The end of the movie. Plot revealed.

What happened in the middle? Who cares, right? You got to skip that and get to the juicy stuff, the conclusion, the answers. No struggles, no challenges, no hard and awkward scenes. Just the gritty bare minimum. To some, this is enough. Being satisfied with what is easy becomes what is true.

Is it worth giving up some of the answers we think we already have, to risk seeing what happens when we cross the threshold? What would we risk to get answers?
What would we risk to forget the answers we think we know, and what would we put ourselves through to get the truth instead?