So this is why.
Feb. 1st, 2005 03:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitchen_kinkThis is how it is. You get up, you go to work. You do what you have to do; if you're lucky, you do what you want to do. You eat. You exercise. You make love and do the dishes and drop the kids off at school.
You keep going.
I wake up early, but doze until nearly ten. It's the first day of February, which I conveniently forget; perhaps the knowledge would have gotten me out of bed sooner with the fond realization that January, the dread month, is finally over.
I drag myself around. I clean up a bit, fix breakfast, write a journal entry. I get ready to leave for Krav practice for the first time in a week and a half. Last week was eaten up by sickness, snowed under by a hail of Kleenex.
Finally I have the ambition to work out again, or at least I have the ambition to get into the car and go try to do so. I'm dreading the class the way I dreaded the classes I taught yesterday: the depression, then, nearly trapped me in the bed for the day.
But yesterday I managed for three hours to talk about literature to a bunch of kids who, with a few exceptions, couldn't care less and thank me with their blank stares, and today I manage to get out on route 93 and head for Roxbury. I'm even on time. At about ten minutes before noon I'm just outside the tunnel, waiting to get off at exit 18.
At 12:30, I'm still there.
It's enough that I'm infuriated by having to sit on the highway for this long. It's more than enough that I've dragged myself out of depression and sickness to go do some cardio and kick some ass, a proactive step to make myself feel better. But the worst of it is that the whole time I'm listening to NPR, and the reports are as follows:
A conservative talks about how a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage should be higher on Bush's agenda, and the reporter takes him seriously, in fact doesn't challenge him at all. Bush's approval rating is lower than any second-term president since Nixon, yet he still takes the November election as evidence that he's been given a mandate by this country to effect change. Meanwhile, as they're still counting the ballots from Iraq's election, an insurgent group has taken an American soldier hostage and says that they will behead him within 72 hours unless the U.S. releases its Iraqi prisoners. In slightly lighter news, the makers of the Oscar-nominated documentary Born into Brothels (subject matter self-evident in the title) are interviewed about their program to rescue children of prostitutes in India, themselves lined up at age 13 to continue the tradition, from their plight.
It's another day in goddamnfuckingparadise.
So I turn around, I go back home, I'm pissed off that I've wasted an hour and a half driving and that meanwhile the world, the country I thought was mine is, as usual, falling apart, and I'm thinking about where I would move and how I would work if we passed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, if we overturned Roe v. Wade, if in four years Dick fucking Cheney secured the presidency, if we go to war in Iran, Syria, Korea...
And I hear a report about an all-male ballet troupe who performs female roles on pointe and in tutus, with no attempt to conceal their maleness, and I laugh a little. I go to the gym and get on the elliptical machine and burn for 25 minutes, in high gear, my rage and helplessness. I read an amusing article about Johnny Depp in Rolling Stone (The New Yorker isn't available today and I didn't bring it from home).
And I go home, and shower, and go to the cafe and write, and I think, this is how it works. This is why it works. This is a few million people, feeling helpless, feeling rage, feeling the same way I'm feeling and knowing that the only thing to do is chop wood, carry water. Keep going.
This is how the status quo holds on, this is how the politicians get away with what they get away with, this is how a government strips its citizens of its freedoms, bit by bit, and legislates the hell out of our lives. And this isn't me telling you to get off your butts and do something, this isn't me getting up and being politically active, this isn't even me going to a demonstration or writing a letter to my congressperson. This is me seeing that it's pointless.
This is me, just trying to live my life.
You keep going.
I wake up early, but doze until nearly ten. It's the first day of February, which I conveniently forget; perhaps the knowledge would have gotten me out of bed sooner with the fond realization that January, the dread month, is finally over.
I drag myself around. I clean up a bit, fix breakfast, write a journal entry. I get ready to leave for Krav practice for the first time in a week and a half. Last week was eaten up by sickness, snowed under by a hail of Kleenex.
Finally I have the ambition to work out again, or at least I have the ambition to get into the car and go try to do so. I'm dreading the class the way I dreaded the classes I taught yesterday: the depression, then, nearly trapped me in the bed for the day.
But yesterday I managed for three hours to talk about literature to a bunch of kids who, with a few exceptions, couldn't care less and thank me with their blank stares, and today I manage to get out on route 93 and head for Roxbury. I'm even on time. At about ten minutes before noon I'm just outside the tunnel, waiting to get off at exit 18.
At 12:30, I'm still there.
It's enough that I'm infuriated by having to sit on the highway for this long. It's more than enough that I've dragged myself out of depression and sickness to go do some cardio and kick some ass, a proactive step to make myself feel better. But the worst of it is that the whole time I'm listening to NPR, and the reports are as follows:
A conservative talks about how a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage should be higher on Bush's agenda, and the reporter takes him seriously, in fact doesn't challenge him at all. Bush's approval rating is lower than any second-term president since Nixon, yet he still takes the November election as evidence that he's been given a mandate by this country to effect change. Meanwhile, as they're still counting the ballots from Iraq's election, an insurgent group has taken an American soldier hostage and says that they will behead him within 72 hours unless the U.S. releases its Iraqi prisoners. In slightly lighter news, the makers of the Oscar-nominated documentary Born into Brothels (subject matter self-evident in the title) are interviewed about their program to rescue children of prostitutes in India, themselves lined up at age 13 to continue the tradition, from their plight.
It's another day in goddamnfuckingparadise.
So I turn around, I go back home, I'm pissed off that I've wasted an hour and a half driving and that meanwhile the world, the country I thought was mine is, as usual, falling apart, and I'm thinking about where I would move and how I would work if we passed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, if we overturned Roe v. Wade, if in four years Dick fucking Cheney secured the presidency, if we go to war in Iran, Syria, Korea...
And I hear a report about an all-male ballet troupe who performs female roles on pointe and in tutus, with no attempt to conceal their maleness, and I laugh a little. I go to the gym and get on the elliptical machine and burn for 25 minutes, in high gear, my rage and helplessness. I read an amusing article about Johnny Depp in Rolling Stone (The New Yorker isn't available today and I didn't bring it from home).
And I go home, and shower, and go to the cafe and write, and I think, this is how it works. This is why it works. This is a few million people, feeling helpless, feeling rage, feeling the same way I'm feeling and knowing that the only thing to do is chop wood, carry water. Keep going.
This is how the status quo holds on, this is how the politicians get away with what they get away with, this is how a government strips its citizens of its freedoms, bit by bit, and legislates the hell out of our lives. And this isn't me telling you to get off your butts and do something, this isn't me getting up and being politically active, this isn't even me going to a demonstration or writing a letter to my congressperson. This is me seeing that it's pointless.
This is me, just trying to live my life.
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no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 01:15 pm (UTC)And in between, you hope a little, and dream a little, and do a little art, or create a little. You try to show your children a better way, you try to be just a little kinder, a little nicer, to slow down just a little bit more than everyone around you. In between, you do the best you can. It is enough.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 01:22 pm (UTC)So not everything went as planned today...isn't that, in itself, worth something?
no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 07:07 pm (UTC)The end of the day was good. I managed to redeem it.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 01:28 pm (UTC)To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better,
whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 01:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 01:45 pm (UTC)The Kingfisher
by Mary Oliver
The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world--so long as you don't mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn't have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn't born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water--hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
I don't say he's right. Neither
do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 01:50 pm (UTC)"To survive is not enough. To simply exist is not enough."
no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 03:03 pm (UTC)If it helps any, the terrorist video is most likely a hoax.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 06:48 pm (UTC)I feel like that sometimes. To stomp it out, I have cultivated a little voice in my head that says, "Move forward!" At its prompting, I pick a priority in my life (right now, moving out of the folks' place!), make a plan to move forward on that priority, and follow through.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-01 07:10 pm (UTC)Hmmm...not really. I've been feeling rather in control of my life, especially of late.
What I feel out of control of is what the larger forces in this world do that could affect how I live my life. And the fact that people who are so far removed from my experience now make up the majority of this country.