ever since I was little, ever since I was little it looked like fun. and its no coincidence I've come. and I can die when I'm done.

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There are only really two awful ways to wake up.

The first is when you're late for something, and you know it in your sleep, and while you're dreaming you hear this subconscious voice screaming through the fog: "Late! Assholewakeup! Youarelate!" And it gets progressively louder, and louder, until all of a sudden subconscious-screaming-you, and dreamy-not-paying-attention-you smash into each other, and that crash wakes you the fuck up, and you jump out of bed and have to run around for the ten minutes you inevitably only have left before you have to be at whatever it is that you're late for, psychotically trying to get your shit together, with the imprint of your hand still embedded in your face and your hair cowlicked on one side.

The other awful way to wake up, is when you're blissfully asleep (and by blissful, I mean effectively dead to the world) and you gently wake up, listening to the quiet of the morning, connection and awareness slowly reviving... and you remember something really awful that happened the day before. And you open your eyes and grimace and just say to your ceiling: "FUCK. FUUUCK."

(Like, for instance, waking up and remembering how cold it is outside.
Whenever it starts getting warmer I feel spring returning, and I get disproportionately excited -- like twelve year olds and ice cream trucks excited, like a surprise party where everyone you've ever liked in your whole life shows up, like an entire desk made out of solid chocolate excited.
When warm weather starts to return, so does Spring, and with it, the return of my will to live. Cause when I wake up and remember that just going outside makes me lose feeling in my hands and feet, I feel like that's a good enough excuse to never leave my room again, instead of being a legitimate part of the world. And its not. A good excuse to do that, I mean. Which brings me to number two.)


Sometimes I wake up, and right away, remember that my thesis is still not done. I'm so exhausted today, and today was supposed to be a day where all I did was write. But a lot of things have been happening this week that I couldn't just push aside and say "I'll deal with after". So I engaged with those things, and didn't touch my thesis at all. The thing is, every time I do that... or every time I'm reminded of situations that I need to address, I get a little more stressed. And that stress... it makes it harder to work on Div III, because I just want it to be finished so badly, I guess. So it gets stretched out. It takes even longer, because it becomes increasingly harder to focus on it so single-mindedly. That stretch... its like running a marathon where the terrain is getting rockier, the finish line feels like its getting farther away cause now your legs are tired and you're starting to trip.

Like being asleep and hearing that voice in the fog telling you that you're late; you can't ignore it forever. The longer you ignore it, the worse it'll be when you finally wake up. You'll be later, you'll have less time. The longer you take to wake up, the harder you will have to hit the ground running just to catch up.

There are things, that for me to ever feel 100% again, I need to turn to and fix. Things with people, personal things... things that have seriously been eating away at me, eroding all the walls I erected to block out noise and zero in on finishing school. These things were just whispers at the beginning of the marathon, but now they are fullyblown and in my face. If I could just stop for a second, I could deal with them, and come back and run this race a whole lot better. But you can't stop a race.

One of those things I had to engage with this week, wanted to and needed to, had to do with racism at Hampshire (and in life). I don't want to say too much about this week because its not my place to (yet?). But I want to say some things about it...

Learning/hearing about, and engaging with racism, has changed everything. And it should. The more I become aware of it, the more I learn, the more I see how it structures my world and the systems within that world, it changes all of that more and more. I can't look at the world anymore in the same way. I can't look at choice or privilege or academics or activism or education or health care or myself or anything in the same way. And slowly, slowly at first, but then with an insane burst of acceleration, it has changed my studies -- this year especially, it has changed how I'm writing and what I'm writing about.

When I'm writing about health care and culturally scripted identities, racism obviously plays a role in that. But not just in obvious ways... in assumed ways, in subliminal ways, in ingrained ways. Part of what I'm writing about has to do with the cultural and public health focus on individuals being responsible for being healthy, getting sick, and getting healthy again. If I start going in-depth as to all the problematic factors/ideas at work in that focus, then I'd have to retype my thesis here. But one things that has really struck me this week is that focus in terms of really hard-to-pinpoint ways that it is inherently racist (and classist, sexist, etc. too) by how it ignores privilege.

Putting the full responsibility of health and "success" on individuals glosses over and willfully ignores all the socio-political factors at work historically and presently. The focus on "taking care of yourself" and all the messages of eating organically and "healthfully" and getting enough exercise and getting regular mammograms and getting tested for HIV regularly all ignores a hella privilege at work behind those statements and what they imply.

First off, those statements assume we all have equal access to health care, education, information, prevention, etc. Second, they assume we all have the privilege of being able to place our health as a "priority". Third, it ignores who is exposed to what; what exposure people have to information and resources, and more literally, geographically and environmentally, who lives where and why, and what they are exposed to because of that. Lastly, those statements assume equal access to, and the equal quality of, all medicine and treatment.
All of the assertions about personal responsibility and health assume equal footing to begin with, and equal footing to end with. They ignore those other factors at work. And when it so happens that someone does become ill, or can't get well, it transfers responsibility onto them for that "failure" as well, again ignoring the extrinsic socio-political factors at work which might prevent them from doing so.
This all reminds me of fucked up arguments I hear about affirmative action -- that students should get into college based on "merit" and "hardwork", aka the more subversive idioms for the deeply entrenched culture of good ole culture American individualism.
What does "merit based" mean when not everyone has the same access to resources/academia and when systems/structures are designed to preserve privilege (especially white privilege)? When educational institutions are were designed by white men, for other white men?
And again, what do those ideas imply about fault and blame when someone does not "succeed" (in school and in resisting illness)?

Sometimes I feel really pressured by my committee to "keep my objectivity", and to "not be too passionate". I don't know... maybe they're right, and I should keep my implied crazy conspiracy theories about 'isms and access and privilege to myself. Or... maybe to me, "objectivity" has become synonymous with apathy and the very privilege it is to BE "objective" about this shit. Cause I don't really want to be objective, or dispassionate. I don't want to only interrupt, I want to interrogate.

This week, this has all been making me think really deeply not just about racism, but also about becoming "actively anti-racist"... a fellow student made this analogy at a teach-in about becoming aware of racism and about being actively anti-racist; they said that as white folx, we are all on one of those airport moving sidewalks, being carried forward by our privilege towards and into racism. You can stand on that moving sidewalk and be completely passive, you can not budge at all, but you're still still moving, you're still being carried forward. Becoming aware of racism, that's turning around on that moving sidewalk. But being actively anti-racist? That means you have to turn around and start walking. Really fast. Because otherwise, you're still going to be on that moving sidewalk, going in that direction.***
Some people were wondering, when do we reach the end of that sidewalk, when do we reach the end of the race to get there? And another student said that maybe the way we have to think about it, is that it will always be about running -- that we will/must always "be becoming anti-racist, and will never arrive".

For the past few years, waking up to how pervasive racism is in my life and the lives of those around me is not only really disturbing because I'm seeing it, but because of how long it took me to BE seeing it.

This week specifically has made me think about it all as if I'm already running one race, and now I'm waking up while running that, and realizing I'm running another at the same time. Like I said before, the longer you take to wake up, the harder you will have to hit the ground running just to catch up. I think about how many years of my life I have been not been becoming actively anti-racist, and how hard and far I have to go to even start getting there. And how tired of running many, many other people already are...

I don't know if this makes any sense... this entry has kind of degraded into cross-metaphor and analogy which I'm not sure makes any sense to anyone but me.
Whatever; either way, there's no returning, no going back to sleep. All of this is moving, going, not stopping -- and every morning I have to wake up, and deal, and start running the races again, even if the finish line is farther away than it was before, or even if there isn't any finish line at all.





***note: I'm pretty sure that analogy is from Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum.

the weight.

A breathless counsel

curiosity will catch you dear for you are a writer and it is your license to startle the world with a hundred thousand words instead of a dazzling smile or those occasional winks and i don’t want to probe for after all you are renouncing all the time and i don’t want to stop you racing against life but i have been there and i have returned and i know what happens when it takes hold of a woman yes i know what happens then but i will not tell you the answers i have sealed my lips i have learnt how not to say what i must be saying somehow i don’t want to be fledging you in security for what happens with all my parenting will only be a compromise darling child instead i let you free i want you to ask the questions i want you to prick and not polish your wounds i will let you to be hurt in the face of the world i want you to learn more than what you want to learn sometimes i feel i want you to get hurt badly hurt and bleed before the world and then i shall sit back and feel my work is done for once you have known what pain is then you shall know how to preserve the fringes of happiness i want you to be alone in the ravenous world where you never know what happens next just so that you will no longer find routine to be so despicable and amidst that pervading fuzziness you shall long for an anchor for all your dreams only realizing much later that you are your safety you are your ultimate but till then you might screech and scream but when you retain your temperament you will find that life will always lie waiting like an hungry beast and at each turn you take i wish you learn the greater horrors and now i confess darling i want you hurt because i want to watch you fight and fight and fight i want you to pull together those moonbeams of hope i want you to throb precariously i want you to be living on the edge i want you to learn the thousand one ways in which you can melt the boundaries of saturation called death and the emptiness of life and the fidgetiness of what might be called love i want you to lose i want you to win but some day i want you to be free

--meena kandasamy

one day i will write something intelligent in here again

and today is not that day.

it'll probably be about antiracism/racism/mythesis/life-otherwise. when it happens. whenever that is.

adieu.

But remember when I moved in you, and the holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was Hallelujah...

mmhmm...

and that is all that ever needs to be said about that.



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everybody's lookn for somebody's arms to fall in to. and it's what it is.... that's what it is now.

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shit, UGH, I know I said I would shut up and not post for a while, but honestly... I have a problem shutting up.

Once I open the floodgates, everything rushes forward to flood, and its too late to say: "Oh gosh, well! Let's just push that water back upstream."

Nope.

If I have learned anything, from being at Hampshire, from writing this blog, and from breathing and being alive in general: its that you can't start talking about one thing, without talkin' about five other somethin' elses.

And that translates over to thinking --
If I was sitting around NOT thinking all day, instead of sitting studiously and passionately trying to understand the intersectionalities/interconnectedness between everything, then maybe, maybe, I could keep away from here long enough to focus on the big push towards my final chapters. But that's what I do, every day -- I sit with forty internet windows open, and eight books open, and believe me, the floodgates have been open for a while now. So there's no keeping away from here, I guess.

I have learned, over the years, to take it down to the levee and sit in the middle of that river and be happy with the water just rushing right by. And even though sometimes I know that my knee-jerk reaction is to answer every question put to me, I think I'm also learning to discern when that water is just poison, poison, poison. And when I should just stay far away from it.

But right now?

I'm up to my neck and I just can't stay away.

What dragged me in here?

This news story, which was a Google News main headline this morning. Which means I'm sure a good, oh, thousands of people are reading it. And since we take the news as gospel, I'm pretty damn sure the great majority of readers are taking the whole thing at face value, case and casket.
I really only got to the second line before I was already furiously angry, and had to look up the writer and find out where the fuck she's from.
"During his recent Africa tour, President Bush rightly highlighted the significant results of his HIV/AIDS strategy, and indicated that he would 'change the tactics' if the strategy is not working."
I'm sorry, wait, WHAT?
I don't know why anyone would trust that man to tell them the goddamn sky is blue, but seriously?
The writer seems truly qualified in that way where you read her publications and silently go: Damn. Janet Fleischman is Chair of the Gender Committee of the CSIS HIV/AIDS Task Force, she' worked for Human Rights Watch, and wrote for the Washington Times, UNAIDS, and SAIS review, just to note a few. I mean... it would appear that the woman obviously knows what's up with the current political climate and HIV prevention. So, I'm real confused as to why, in the second sentence of an article, Ms. Fleischman gives President Bush props for his HIV/AIDS policy. Maybe I'm missing something, something really obvious to everyone else, cause last time I checked, President Bush's HIV/AIDS strategy was pretty lacking.

Two and a half years ago, in 2005, Ms. Fleischman's own organization, the CSIS HIV/AIDS Task Force released a publication outlining what indicators would be important for determining whether the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR, for those paying attention), would be a successful initiative in actually helping to "stem the tide of HIV".

Right off the bat, the publication stipulated this: "Last year, close to 5 million people were newly infected with HIV, according to UNAIDS. At current rates of infection, millions more people will become infected with HIV by the end of the decade. There is growing concern that worldwide attention to antiretroviral treatment (ART) scale-up may be eclipsing attention to prevention—and at great cost to both prevention and treatment efforts. And, without a significant reduction in new infections, it will not be possible to keep pace with the number of people with HIV/AIDS in need of treatment. Therefore, making progress on prevention— through PEPFAR and other global efforts—is of critical importance."

The report also said this about PEPFAR:
- "PEPFAR program-level indicators are disaggregated according to the 'ABC' approach, with a major emphasis on measuring activities focused on abstinence and/or faithfulness. All other activities, including those related to condom use, are classified as “other behavior change.” The
indicators used by the other three initiatives examined do not specify program content at this level."
- "There are currently no PEPFAR prevention indicators that specifically measure prevention interventions designed to address nonmedical injecting drug transmission (e.g., referral of injecting drug users to addiction treatment)."

Last time I checked, HIV rates in America were on the rise. And, also, last time I checked, PEPFAR “contains several restrictions, including those on funding for prevention activities and on organizations working with commercial sex workers.” and refuses to fund needle exchange programs to prevent HIV transmission among drug users.

And Bush's "Effort"? Just (1) doesn't (2) seem (3) that (4) amazing.


[for what its worth, i do agree with many things she says in the article later on...BUT...]

Excuse me if I think that while PEPFAR represents a historic precedent in the United States combating HIV/AIDS, and while in comparison to doing nothing, it has been a truly positive change with the effects felt world-wide :

It's just. not. good. enough.


I don't want to be angry. And believe me, I'm aware of the resistance to prevention efforts. I understand the subtle nuances of navigating policy making and implicating those policies. But with that said, I just don't see why we should be pattin' George on the back for his brilliant work fighting HIV.

We can do better. Looking at the work being done and saying: "Well, that's better than what came before, so in that regard, its excellent!"... is bullshit. Just because someone acknowledges a problem, just because they kind of, sort of, step up to the plate, doesn't mean we should congratulate them on a job well done. Good job, there's a huge HUGE epidemic out there. And somehow you don't have your head totally and completely wedged up your ass, and have implemented some concrete policies. Just because you did something, doesn't mean it was enough.

Have I really become that radical? Or is it that I just expect too much? Someone please let me know if I should be satisfied with a little patronization and a lot empty gestures. Because a policy which allocates only 20% of its budget towards prevention, with one third of that reserved for abstinence-only campaigns... seems like a little patronization and a lot of empty gestures.
Yes, PEPFAR is a world-wide precedent. Is it anywhere near where the kind of precedent we should have set? NO.

I'm not satisfied anymore with empty gestures -- its not enough to just say things; I'm waiting for your follow up.
Maybe my expectations are too high. Maybe when I expect more and better, I set myself up to be disappointed. Maybe I just need a really solid submersion in cold reality.
And maybe I should keep my mouth shut and be satisfied; because I see the water rising, and if I keep opening my mouth, I have a feeling I'm going to drown in it.