Millions of Little Pieces

It’s incredible how humans adapt to their situations, no matter how dire they are. And even when they are not dire, when they are just difficult, sad, regretful, somehow people find a way to go on about the business of living. There’s so much that parents try to protect us from. So much they often see that we cannot.

Well, Chicago isn’t cold yet, thank goodness. Last few days it’s been really nice out. Temperature around 50 and sunny. My morning ritual on Sundays now is to go to walk to Division and get two empanadas for breakfast. I pack a ziplock bag with little pieces of crackers for the ducks and walk around looking for areas in the park where my face can soak in the sun and I can watch the ripples in the water. The dogs walk their owners, bike their owners, run their owners. Families run through the grass on crunchy leaves; kids yell and scream diving into piles of brown while parents hold their breath praying they don’t land on a pile of shit underneath. My MP3 player is in my brown leather purse but I don’t play anything; I just put the buds in my ear so that I can ignore the uninvited comments from hung-over Puerto Ricans on the way there. I take them out once I reach the park and just look out onto the water.

It’s bright and the sun shines so that I can see the flecks of dust, pollen, pollution floating above the water dancing in the wind, never landing. The pigeons fly through quickly like they’re afraid a duck might just take off and bump into them on the way up. I still look. Stopped telling myself to control my thoughts. I follow them from what I feel now. I don’t run away from the feelings. No matter how many times my eyes fill up I just let the liquids run out of them. After, pick up my book Saddhartha I’m reading now–lots of interest and a collection of essays by Richard Rodriguez.

I read some more. Throwing the crusty parts of the empanadas and the crackers at the heads of my hungry friends. I wonder how it all looks to them. Couples walk, jog, bike by me happy the cold hasn’t arrived yet. Thoughts race through my head still over and over like a broken record ‘I didn’t come here to do this alone.’ And I’m angry but mostly just so sad and a pure kind of sad not a pitiful type of sadness. The night before I asked a question about him knowing I would never get the kind of answer I was looking for. The hours, days, weeks–the months role by and I find myself topless on my crunchy carpet pajama pants on no underwear the tears falling out my eyes, spread eagle waiting for it to pass. It always passes. But I can never predict when it will come I don’t know if a rain drop might start it up again or just looking around at the aparment with all that extra room now, sleeping in the middle of my bed taking up more space, looking at the nails in the walls closing my eyes or mostly how it haunts me every night in my dreams; and I can’t control it when it comes. Stupid memories, stupid fucking memories that lie to me. Sometimes I run to the bathroom at work trying to get there before the tears reach my lashes. And my little heart breaks into a million tiny little pieces until I’m able to crazy glue it back together again.

Long distance relationships ruin your sex life (NOVEMBER 30 2008)

On a good day, I’d jerk off two-three times a day (whether or not I get sex). Once as soon as I wake up and once before bed and sometimes the third time right after I get home from work and the gym and I plop onto my bed exhausted with nothing else to do. Of course this isn’t every day of the week but somewhere between 4-6 days per week. It helps me to stay energized, helps me sleep, helps keep me in good spirits–it feels good and it’s a part of my daily routine. But ever since deciding to me monogamous in a long-distance relationship (yea I know) I’ve noticed that I have been struggling to ‘get it up.’

Que Bonito Puerto Rico

I just came back from Puerto Rico this week earlier, it was beautiful, warm and full of salsa. What a relief from the weather (and searing heartbreak) here in Chicago). While bitter sweet (this was intended to be a surprise birthday trip for Mr. P) I gotta say I’m going back and I’ll tell write more about it in my next post, pictures to come as well.

Chicago: A great city for alcoholics

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. I know every place is a hood but here it’s very intentional. There are bars at every corner on residential streets between the laundromats and the markets, hidden between two brownstones hidden between balconies and flower beds. It’s easy for an alcoholic here I’ve never been to another city in the U.S. with so many little bars.

Chicago is also cold. That’s an understatement; well last winter was one of the worst this city has seen in the last ten years (at least that’s what the meteorologists say but for some reason the meteorologists here NEVER get the weather straight). It was painful really especially after having spent that last several years in Atlanta where people complain and school shuts down if it’s less than 40 degrees. Love is worth the cold though.

“Is compromise going against all your beliefs, fighting all of your natural instincts and changing your values for good sex and the hope of finding happiness and wholeness outside of yourself, away from  a higher power?” That’s what I wrote in my last post which was over seven months ago! Those were thoughts I was having and they often pop into my mind but I don’t believe them to be my fundamental truths.

This is hard to write. I don’t yet have the words and I thought that writing might help me get them out. I thought that perhaps if I only just could articulate it here in this blog, in cyberspace, on my keypad  with my spellcheck and some clever jokes then maybe I could admit it. I’m not ready yet I guess or maybe I just don’t have any words. Sometimes when bad things happen words escape us.

Getting back to the way things were

Can you ever remember a time when you didn’t wish things were just a little bit different? A time when if you only had that one wish, it would make your life perfect? That’s the problem with the way things were. If you go back to it, nothing will really change all that much. You’ll have fun for awhile but there will be a small part of you secretly discontent because of the one thing that you don’t possess. Going back to the way things were is like returning to the womb. After having seen the light, felt the warmth of another person, smelled the scent of your mother, a lover, how could you go back to the beginning when all the lights and sounds were clouded and came from outside of your protected existence?

Going back never works with human beings relating to one another. Isn’t that really what a relationship is? So then what is forgiveness? And what does it mean to change? Is compromise going against all your beliefs, fighting all of your natural instincts and changing your values for good sex and the hope of finding happiness and wholeness outside of yourself, away from from a higher power? Hmm…just some thoughts floating through my head that day…

Chicago Salsa

I’ve moved. I’ve stopped writing. And I’m domesticated once again.

But, I will be changing the spin of things here on my bloggie blog–getting back into the swing of things. (No, I don’t know exactly what that means.) I know that the 2+ people that read this blog as I’ve seen on my stats are just folks who’ve accidentally stumbled upon my posts because I’ve inserted the words “free pussy pics” randomly throughout this blog and not because they have any interest whatsoever in what I–lowly I–have to say.

That said, I’m going to begin documenting my time here in Chicago using film and reviews of live music as my medium. I’ve been blessed enough, unlike most of the country, to find a job that pays well and happens to be work I LOVE doing and unlike other work I’ve had, I’m very much appreciated here. My apartment is in a neighborhood called Humboldt Park. Humboldt Park is a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood with a long history of cultural resistance. Like other cities around the countries, it is being gentrified (like my beloved Harlem & Washington Heights) but it is a beautiful little spot and my apartment is cute. It sits right on the edge of another neighborhood called Ukranian Village (guess who predominantly lives there).

I arrive exactly 29 days ago, January 6th, right in the middle of this “cold front.” It’s nothing like New York City—way colder.

I’m still fucking around with this salsero here. Mr. P. He’s a very sweet man. Like that song Aretha Franklin sang. He’s also a sloppy eater and a great lay, a little too sensitive and sometimes strangely insecure, also confident and funny and once in a while kind of unreadable–like we all are I’m sure. We’ll see about this one. For now, he’s a keeper. 

The great thing about Chicago is the salsa scene here. I’ve been told it isn’t any where near what it used to be. But after spending so many years in Atlanta where the salsa scene is relatively small, predictable and live music scarce–Chicago is great for salsa! There are at least 5 nights a week somewhere playing live salsa and as the year rolls on, especially past March, it’ll be every night of the week. My next post will be soon…I promise pussy picture readers. I’ll come back with some photos, maybe a little review of the local salsa scene and lots more.

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

This is not my article, but the person who wrote it is cited. I was glad to see this and I think it helps to explain to everyday folks the realities of life for people of color and how every single move that people of color make, just as every decision a woman makes IS politicized. unfortunately, men are trained not to notice their privilege and therefore perpetuate it (even though they are not necessarily  ’sexist’ just as white people are trained not to notice their privilege–both privileges which are undeserved). Just as it should not be a woman’s responsibility to carry the burden of male domination, it should not be the burden of people of color for white privilege.

Here is the link to other writings from this person

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

“I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group”

Peggy McIntosh

Through work to bring materials from women’s studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to women’s statues, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women’s disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there are most likely a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of while privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in women’s studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, “having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?”

After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are just seen as oppressive, even when we don’t see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow “them” to be more like “us.”

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Daily effects of white privilege

I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and time of work cannot count on most of these conditions.

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.

3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.

11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person’s voice in a group in which s/he is the only member of his/her race.

Test

Every moment is a test. A test to see what my real intentions are. A test to see if I’m growing up. A test to see if I’ve lied to myself all this time. A test to see if I’m strong enough to live by my convictions even if the people I care about may leave. A test of myself. A test to see if I’ll tell the truth this time. A test of my family and friends. A test of will and desire. A test of detachment. Every moment now is a test and all I can think of is the answer key. You are my answer. You.

Esta Rumba

This past week my body has been very weak, not matter how much rest I get or how much food I eat. I’ve reached a place though that I’ve never reached before. I don’t care anymore. Not in a bad, depressed way. In a very healthily detached way. Although it’s frustrating because the people around me really don’t know (I don’t tell them), I guess I’ll figure it out. I have one semester of class left, only 1 course to take. I still plan on NYU for grad school. We’ll see how that works out. The weather is beautiful here in Atlanta. I know where I want to go now and I’ve let go of my fantasy (no details). It was a nice one though but I’m staying put at least until my lease is up September 2009. If any moves should happen, it won’t be me. I’m too new at this to do it all over again.

I’ve been super anti-social all week. In fact, I don’t even want to leave my apartment even though it’s gorgeous outside. I’m actually missing dancing in the park right now (to live music). But I feel good here just lying around. Yesterday I got so tired of being around people, I started annoying myself because I couldn’t get away from me. Isn’t that just ridiculous? I can’t wait to get back to New York City! That’s all for now. Saw that movie Iron Man. I have to write an entire separate blog about that movie. Politically, it was sooo fucked up. Special effects and ‘coolness’ factor was okay though. Aight, I’m out. Stay black.

La Primera Pelea

Last week was insanity. There was a big conference with work in Chicago. Finally, after several months, me and Mr. P had our first fight. It was quite the little squabble, in fact, I thought it would be our last one. I was more disappointed with the way he acted than the fight itself, especially because I didn’t think it was a big deal at the beginning. There’s no need to get into details except to say that at the end of it all, fear was the only reason the fight happened in the first place. I had predicted back in December that that particular weekend would be our last weekend together, because it would mark the end of my work in Chicago for that project. So when he walked out, I figured I was right and maybe that was what he wanted. What struck me too was my own reaction. If this were a few years ago I probably would have been very abrasive, hurtful even. But I learned a few things from someone a lot more patient than me. “Better that happened now than later,” my girlfriend told me. I said to her that his reaction was unexpected and that the things he said were impossible to forgive more than once. I didn’t mention it at the time but I had to question myself about what forgiveness really meant.

The make-up sex wasn’t really make-up sex. At least it didn’t feel like that to me. He made love to me afterwards. It was very early in the morning, early enough for the sun to start rising. I didn’t want to fall asleep. I wanted to lay there and squeeze the life out of him with my thighs. I love Mr. P. I don’t need Mr. P. I want Mr. P to trust me. I want to be consistent enough so that Mr. P can learn how to trust me. I’ve noticed that he’s sensitive, much more sensitive than I am. On the other hand there are 700 miles between us. Still, there have been larger distances, barriers and obstacles that other lovers and couples have had to deal with.