2009 wrap up, because one must.

2009... ah.

Well, I’m probably in a lousy position to write about 2009 with any sort of balance or perspective, but that’s what year end wrap-ups are all about. Projecting your current predicament back over a year, or decade, or lifetime. Much like therapy.

In 2009 I

• wrote a collection of poetry which made me truly proud, earned university honors, and totally escaped the interest and reading of my family (for better and worse).
• found the sort of group of friends I’d wanted to find all through college, and spent six or so fabulous months with them, writing and match-making and dancing and eating.
• wrote 50+ cover letters in the face of constant anxiety attacks about the future.
• turned down three job offers.
• accepted my first full time, adult job.
• moved to New York City, most overwhelming place on Earth.
• played out an inevitable relationship to great success followed by great failure, with the hope of another shot at both.
• lost my cat, Sadie, who got me through some very dark times and wore a tutu like a champ.
• started a blog I feel good about sharing with the world.
• started therapy, medication, and possibly started taking care of myself.
• co-produced a night of jazz and slam poetry, something totally new to the university and totally awesome by all accounts.
• performed my poetry for the first time, and promptly forgot how good that can feel.
• lived, briefly, with two straight boys.
• missed Chicago more than I ever would have thought possible.
• watched a friend endure a horrible accident and hospital stay, realized I could do nothing.
• cooked more, for more people, and realized what a wonderful thing that is.
• started building real relationships with my siblings as people.

In 2010 I will

• write more
• spend more time alone because I want to
• spend more time with friends because I want to
• read more books
• talk to my brother and sister every week
• explore cities by myself
• pack my lunch
• keep my space cleaner
• do better at working during work time
• take steps towards law school
• make casual friends
• re-learn to just hang out
• spend time with children
• make it through another year.

cum hoc ergo propter hoc

I've been considering working these words into a tattoo for about a year now. Cum Hoc and Post Hoc are logical fallacies of causation: roughly, that correlation suggests or constitutes causation. There are philosophers that go so far as to argue that causation itself is a logical fallacy, based on our unproved assumption that the future models the past. I don't know if I'd go that far, but I find deep questioning of our collective reliance on causal thinking appealing. Causation allows us to wrap things up neatly, to feel we understand how the world works, to believe negative outcomes can be easily fixed or avoided.

This is especially damaging when dealing with issues of privilege. In a thousand small ways, we harbor the belief that good things happen to good people, and conversely, that those who suffer brought it on themselves. This allows for an enormous degree of indifference and cruelty, especially toward the poor, the sick and disabled, the fat... any group in which membership should be morally neutral, attributed to chance and circumstance, rather than some underlying moral turpitude.

One of the major arts in education groups here in New York released results from a study that found a strong correlation between arts education and increased high school graduation rates. I think most readers would find this utterly unsurprising. The surprising part was that, despite presenting absolutely no evidence of a causal link, this group made recommendations to increase arts funding in order to increase graduation rates.

Why might schools with good arts programs have high graduation rates? Because they are better funded. Because they have a better staff to student ratio. Because parents who have time and energy to advocate for arts are likely to be operating with a high level of privilege across many categories, and have more time to support their children's education. You know what? I might even believe that arts programs act as incentives to come to school, and allow challenged students to shine, helping them stick it out through graduation. But the survey didn't prove it.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could correct our utter failure of an education system by throwing a few million dollars at the arts? Wouldn't that fit right in with our liberal priorities, our notions of well-rounded education? It's certainly more convenient than addressing the massive economic and power imbalances in public school education. It's easier than tackling poverty.

This is still just a jumble of thoughts, I guess. I just wonder if there's an underlying theme here, some sort of connection between causal thinking and privilege that I'm not yet capable of articulating. I do know that it helps me to think reasonably when I'm asking big questions about why bad things happen. The answer is always multi-faceted, always bigger than a simple trigger and heap. To ignore confounding factors, systemic inequality and plain old chance is to enforce dangerous notions of Personal Accountability as the ultimate truth. Maybe: To think progressively is to challenge convenient notions of causation.

An update on Sadie's health

Hello All

I thought I’d give you a bit of an update on Miss Sadie, who has been doing spectacularly poorly lately. She’s been staying at the vet since Tuesday, where they admitted her to try and identify the cause of her jaundice, weight loss and weakness. Since then we’ve been through a host of diagnoses, conflicting and complementary. At this point they’re treating her for a blood parasite (which doesn’t show up on any of her panels, but a tech thinks he saw on the blood slide), and she has a feeding tube to deal with her Fatty Liver Disease, which is the big danger.

Fatty Liver basically means a happy, round cat got unhappy and stopped eating. Sadie didn’t take well to my mother’s house or the week with a cat-sitter. She may also have been feeling lousy because of this parasite. Whatever the reason, she stopped eating, and her liver clogged up from processing her body fat into food. Lack of appetite is a vicious cycle in cats, and it’s pretty impossible to get her to eat at this point. The only treatment for Fatty Liver is to get the metabolism back up, to nourish Sadie and flush out her liver, hence the feeding tube.

I’m going home to collect her tonight, and moving her to a sunny new apartment in Hell’s Kitchen tomorrow, where the feeding regimen will begin. The vet is recommending a 4-times-a-day feeding schedule, meaning ever six hours Sadie and I have to wrestle some mush and meds down her tube. Eventually this comes down to 3-a-day, and in the long term she (hopefully) starts eating again on her own. Her prognosis isn’t good, even with this near-constant care, so I’m banking on her being young and more resilient than the doctors give her credit for.

It’s been a rough week around these parts, but nothing compared to what the kitten’s been going through. Keep her in your thoughts if you can, and if anybody around New York is interested in visiting (or helping me with lunchtime feedings, I have no idea how this is going to work with my full-time job) drop a line. We’d both appreciate it, certainly.

1 train, 11PM Sunday

A woman walks on the train wearing thin old clothes, but clean. She passes her eyes up and down the aisle before launching her speech, which begins the way of each jolting train pitch: Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for the interruption. She goes on to explain that she is hungry, has nowhere to sleep, is trying to provide for her little ones. That she is looking for a job but cannot find one. A man begins shouting back at her, loudly enough for the whole train to hear. At first he offers the usual epithets: Get a job. Leave us alone. I heard this story from you last week.

The woman continues, doggedly avoiding his glare, but her detractor grows louder. The woman informs the train that she was just like us, that she never thought she would be begging on the subway, that she would gladly make use of anyone's leftovers or candy bars. The man begins shouting louder: I heard this last week, get a job. Another man shouts back, says let the woman talk, don't you have a heart? The man does not seem to. No one is buying your crap, he says. They defend you because they've never heard you shill before. Last week you were blind. The week before you had one leg.

Finally she locks eyes with the man: And I suppose you gave me yours then, two weeks ago? And it has only just grown back. Generous soul.


Having collected a meager handful of change, the woman storms off at the next station. The yelling man gets off with me on the Upper West Side, and I climb the stairs to the street behind him. He walks with a limp. His legs are swollen and pocked -- I have seen this before only on homeless men and women, who cannot get their medication or basic nutrition. The man hobbles down the street in black jean shorts and a black shirt which do not look dirty except from very close, and re-cocks his bright white baseball cap atop his head, the brim flat and strong and new.

***

I walk home and think sickly of my own discomfort. We ask our government to care for people like these two so that we can ride the train undisturbed; so the veracity of their suffering is someone else's to decide. We do not care that this woman eats, so much as that she stops asking us for food. Let her go to a beuareu, an agency, a line. Let her be cared for and out of sight.

It is amazing to me that the rich do not want this too, do not want the poor off the street and train and out of the way. It would cost no more than landscaping: a surface level renovation at most. But the rich do not ride the trains and do not walk the street, and there are no poor behind wrought iron gates nor at the top of office buildings. Is this why the middle class votes blue? To help those who need it, and thus delineate ourselves as those who do not. To vaguely support the bringing up of others and never again feel its sharp discomfort.

This is what free speech means to so many: the right to beg where one pleases. The right to talk back to beggars. The silent desire of two dozen train riders for silence, for peace, for keeping dignity and disgrace safely under wraps, elsewhere.

You do not have to read my lists.

Things to do: very short term

• Obtain newspapers.
  
• Pack up kitchen with said newspapers.
  
• Pick up cap, gown, convocation tickets.
  
• Take all art off walls.
  
• Clear out closet.
  
• Pick out interview outfit.
  
• Pick and print resume, writing samples, and references.
  
• Finish building roof rack.
  
• Trim kitten's nails.

Things to do: relatively longer term

• Find a therapist.
  
• Build a website.
  
• Find a 9 to 5 ringtone.
  
• Write a tome about representation of women in Away We Go and the world.
  
• Start researching law schools.
  
• Read more Michael Pollan books.
  
• Upload all Riff videos to youtube.
  
• Calm the eff down, things will be fine.

On Sotomayor

Obama's first choice SCOTUS nomination is not a big surprise -- people have been speculating Sotomayor since before he was elected. If she makes it through confirmation (which she should), her judgeship could have a massive effect on the course of US case law. If the baseball ruling is any indication, Sotomayor has an eye for the "little guy" (even when the little guy is huge athletes making millions of dollars annually), which bodes well for labor relations and the like. She's relatively young, only 54, combined with the fact that she's a woman suggests the likelihood of a long tenure, i.e. sustained influence.

What I find really fascinating about the coverage of the SCOTUS tapping, though, is the focus on Sotomayor's apparent assertion that a person's life experience, including but not limited to their race, gender, religion, social status and (duh) specific legal preparation will inevitably influence rulings. Conservatives are all up in arms about this fact, and this left me scratching my head for a while. How could anyone make judgment calls from anywhere but their own skin, their own experience? Then I remembered that conservative courts consist almost exclusively of straight wealthy white men. So the issue is really ruling from the body and history of a middle aged Latina from the Bronx.

The belief that one's experience is universal may be the crux of privilege -- all types -- male, white, hetero, cisgender, economic, and so on. In order to believe that a judge is impartial in an absolute sense, one must believe that he speaks from a place of absolute authority and a pure world view -- we wouldn't want our justice contaminated by particular compassion for oppressed groups, for example. If creative nonfiction classes have taught me one thing, it's that Americans need to think harder about our notions of objectivity, truth, fairness, and that whole universe of ideas. We need to become comfortable speaking from our own bodies and histories, and not subjugating the truths we live to a so-called universal norm. Sonia Sotomayor's experience reflects that of some part of America, and I'd wager, a much bigger percentage than just women of color -- the experience of any type of oppression changes world views, and in my opinion, changes them for the wiser.

And that is why I'm stoked about Sotomayor -- because we may, on a national level, get to have this discussion about universality and truth. Also because, as Blanca points out, she used to have a little now she has a lot and no matter where she goes she knows where she came from (the Bronx).

Oh hey

It would appear that I do not use this blog anymore. Mostly I have moved over to Tumblr, where the format makes me feel guilty for foisting too many thoughts on the faceless void, which can only be a good thing. Come say hey.

I, too, dislike it.

While we're at it, you can check out the group blog I just foolishly committed myself to for the month of April, aka National Poetry Month:
A Rose is a Rose is a Poem.

I may pick this puppy back up for longer posts, probably political posts, which require more breathing room to arrive at a point. Maybe not, though.

Thoughts that have nothing to do with the new year.

Check it out, The Weepies on the tv! Deb Talan continues to be the cutest. I know nothing about this Dirty Sexy show but it looks boring.


As much as the Obama transition team is making questionable and hurtful decisions *cough* Rick Warren and Sanjay Gupta *cough*, they bring us some very exciting news on equality as well: the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is going to be the first vote in the new Congress, along with another measure to protect those who disclose their earnings to encourage transparency. This puppy got filibustered in the Senate with the help of candidate McCain's ambivalent nastiness last year, it's enormously exciting that it's coming back and a strong showing out the gate for equal rights. You can tell your congressperson how you feel about the matter right here.

This is a really good argument against speed cameras. Leave it to over-privledged high school students to invent a more convincing argument for the fallibility of using machines as sole evidence of wrongdoing than law scholars in Texas, Maryland and Iowa.


I am thinking about getting myself a Tumblr. Getting back to school has made my brain kick back on all at once -- I'm excited about classes but I also want to be doing a bunch of other writing and sundry projects. I only worry that I am too verbose for the scrapbook format. Hm.