I am American. WE are American. That’s going to take some getting used to. . .suddenly not feeling disenfranchised from the previously brainwashed abyss of the States. In the words of a homeless black woman at work:
WE HAVE A PRESIDENT.
Yes, we do. Maybe now we will get to play catch-up with the rest of the developed world.
What a couple of months it has been! I was going about my life–la dee da–and then whoops! We moved. My job changed. We went river rafting. School was in full swing and then I dropped both classes. I started taking melatonin for my sleep problems and hurray it seems to be working. Halloween came and I was so tired and preoccupied that I did not dress up or even poke holes in a pumpkin. Yes, THAT is how weird I have been lately, weird enough to not care about Halloween. But I think I am on the mend. This week I started my new work schedule at the wellness center where I have 3 consecutive days off every week and all evenings open and not being in school has already helped immensely. Thanksgiving and our housewarming shindig were nice and we’ve had two weekends of out-of-town guests, all of which were most enjoyable. I am trying very hard to be happy and it is starting to work again. Wish me luck.
Since interactions with friends and family aren’t dependent upon my appearance this is all based on work, school, and out-and-about experiences.
I receive plenty of sweetness, polite manners, and unwanted sexual remarks and advances. The assumption seems to be that I am younger, less experienced, more naive, and kinder than I actually am. When I put my foot down ignorance is thought to be the cause.
I receive considerably less remarks, questions, comments and awareness of my existence in general. I’m assumed to be less forgiving and funny, more shy and with greater direction than I am or have. When I put my foot down people are more willing to believe my reasons are good ones.
I receive more requests for advice and input, name-calling, and rants about things people assume I oppose (or against things they think I support). I’m assumed to be more seriously-minded, independent, smart and mean than I actually am. When I put my foot down it’s just because I’m a bitch.
Auburn (in various shades/intensities)
I’m the brunt of fewer assumptions and suppositions and am treated the most like who I actually am, which is why sooner or later I always return to it. The bolder the red the nicer people tend to be.
Old people really like it, maybe because they relate to that level of not caring about aesthetical norms. Homeless people warm up to me more quickly than usual, I think because it makes me look less straight-laced than they think I am with normally-colored hair. People in general are friendlier to the point that if I go anywhere at all someone will act palsy towards me. In all cases I think the central message purple hair sends out is “No, it’s cool, I’m not here to judge anybody!”
I am the hero of little girls everywhere! Their tiny jaws drop and giggles aplenty ensue upon sighting the glory of my pinkness. It will be a sad thing to turn my back on this new-found army of revelatory joy.
I don’t remember. . .it’s been a few years.
I had a fun little Islamic/Lesbian Feminist moment yesterday Downstairs.
I bend over a lot at work loading laundry, cleaning showers, and so on, and I noticed when I first started there that if there were people around, particularly behind me, I tended to squat down or work sideways, as if I was wearing a dress and afraid I might flash somebody. Now I just do my work and don’t worry about my ass sticking out at people all the time. We’re all women and nobody cares.
This intrigued me yesterday because there happened to be one of our males-who-identifies-as-a-woman and a couple of ladies-who-like-ladies present at the same time and my mode of going about my business remained just as functional and unladylike. This implied that my comfort wasn’t because we all had vaginas, and it wasn’t because there was a guarantee of absent sexual objectification, it was because we all had feminine identities. There’s something resembling visual assault when an unwelcomed dude does the leering, but when it’s a woman it merely is what it is instead of carrying all that weight of social power.
That last thought is what made me realize, “Holy shit, I’m experiencing the validity of Separatism!”
Both the Lesbian Feminism movement and Muslim culture preach the empowerment of private all-woman spaces. It’s a connection that amuses me and to a degree they’re right. Living every day in a man-dominated world can be downright exhausting, so a man-free zone provides a sanctuary where one can relax and just be. I see it work for the women all the time, and I am now seeing how it works for me, for after working a shift Upstairs I am often anxious and hyped up on adrenaline, whereas after working a shift Downstairs I feel content and focused.
It’s nice!
The homeless women I see every day have no place of their own, no time to their selves, and so it is not uncommon for some to become totally undone once they close the shower curtain and turn on the water. For them, the shower is a place of soul-bearing honesty and comfort in a world of harsh public vulnerability. A person who seemed lucid and strong a minute before can easily dissolve into raw emotion. I hear them talk to themselves, laugh, cackle, cry and sob, one woman howls rather heatedly, another moans in what sounds like pure agony. But regardless of their state prior to showering, and the weirdness projected during, their spirit is always noticeably higher afterwards. The dirt-and-sorrows-of-the-world analogy is quite obvious, but it really is wonderful to witness.
Same-sex relationships seem to be much more common among homeless females than they are within the housed populace. I don’t think being gay makes one more likely to be homeless and I don’t think old fashioned homosexuality is any higher than in mainstream society, but maybe homelessness prevents attraction to men? Consider the causes of homelessness and it makes a lot of sense. The mentally ill/disabled, the physically ill/disabled, and addicts–and most homeless women fall into at least one of those categories–are more susceptible than their able-bodied, wholly-minded contemporaries to abuse, in all its ugly forms. I haven’t conducted a survey or anything, but it’s pretty clear these women have negative histories with men, and I’m sure that helps make their sister-friends look pretty damn attractive. We have our needs, after all!
By “needs” I mean emotional and romantic intimacy and committed companionship. Pervs.
It seems like every December 31st/January 1st people who observe New Year’s divide into two opposing philosophical camps, the Resolutionists and the Irrelevantists. The former is obvious and socially sanctified, and already receives plenty of cricitism, so I’d like to harp on the latter.
Ian is a cranky member of the Irrelevant line of thinking and loves to lecture about the history of our calendar and how it’s all entirely arbitrary, how the first hour of 2007 is really no different than the last hour of 2006, and blah blah blah. This stance is reactionary and is only a dismissal of the Resolutionist view of renewed time, which, as I understand it, is that last year is a dried up old flower decomposing into dirt whereas this year is newly green and moist and beginning to blossom. And OK, that is really stupid.
Time can’t be old or new–it is time and it is space.
However, I don’t see anything wrong with making regularly spaced (by let’s say a “year,” since that’s how we’ve organized time) dates with yourself to reflect on a recent, past segment of your life and the world and to contemplate and rejoice in the possibilities of the near future. It’s nice to look back at some shitty thing you’ve gone through and think, “Fuck I’m glad that’s over,” and it’s good to build a framework for things to come so you don’t blink and it’s Christmas again. People are weird and we need excuses sometimes to express our love, hope, sadness, and regret. This is a good one.
What I am trying to show you about is that New Year’s should be like a secular Rosh Hashana.
(A Rant By the Cough-Addled Moi, 14 Hours Into My Workday)
For the sake of laziness (not simplicity which has far too many practicalities to its credit because simple and practical are not the same damn thing) I’m going to adopt some terminology to keep my two jobs straight. I will from now on refer to my front desk job as “working Upstairs” and to the homeless women’s center as “working Downstairs”.
OK, so this morning I was Downstairs and feeling very tired, sick, and just generally lackadaisical. So instead of socializing or rearranging inventory between stuff-to-do times I read from one of our many Binders of Interesting Stuff (one is all about common health issues in the shelter environment, one is a comprehensive, although out-of-date, compilation of every social service you can imagine in the Puget Sound area–you get the idea). Unlike the others its content wasn’t informative, but intended only to keep us poor “Servers” from getting too disheartened. It was full of probably a few years worth of those Weekly Reflections I wrote about before.
Anyways, the disturbing thing that I learned and wanted for whatever reason to declare on this here interweb is that, apparently, “God”–as a word, as it is practiced–doesn’t mean anything to me. I read the quotes, poems and stories at a fairly stable rate and with a fairly stable level of interest in understanding what I was reading, and then whenever I saw the word “God” or “Lord” I quickened my pace or skipped over that section entirely. It’s like when you’re reading a story that really has your attention and you come across a long foreign name, or maybe some French or Latin phrase that supposedly all haughty intellectuals are supposed to know, but you don’t, or any group of words that to you just looks like a string of irrelevant letters. If it’s French or Latin maybe you’ll search for a root you recognize, but if it’s a name in something that looks like a click language and you can’t fathom how to pronounce it you probably skip right over it. (Example: when I was reading Anna Karenina there were so many goddamn characters and all of them had Russian names, a language I know diddly about, that when I read names I basically scanned it for a series of letters and that’s what I knew the characters by. Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky? That was Stiva Arkd-Obsky, and so on). It’s as simple as tihs tnhig ebevyrdoy kowns auobt tkhnas to teh ietrnnet. We don’t really read, generally. We scan for things we recognize; we search for what we already understand to gain a larger/deeper understanding.
Well, I don’t understand the word “God”:
PROBLEM PROBLEM PROBLEM.
It has too many conflicting meanings, too wide a range of perceptions, for it to mean anything at all. I read it and I see an abyss of generalizations. I try to find meaning in the context, like I would with any word I don’t understand, and all I see is the author’s laziness. They assume I know what they mean by “god’s will,” “god’s love,” they think I know who their audience is when they lament, “Lord, grant me ___” and “thank you, Lord.” I guess my gauge is this: if you erase each sentence that contains “Lord” and “God” is there any weight left to the work? Absolutely sometimes, but in my experience the answer is more often, “No, not a lot.” And that’s lazy and irritating and utterly unmoving. My newly discovered problem that maybe I shouldn’t allow to be a problem is that I feel even more ridiculously isolated from the world’s gigantic population of Folk Who Believe In “God.” I want to understand SO BADLY, but we seem to be stupidly unable to communicate because of a lame vocab discrepancy.
This is one of many reasons why I like old-timey gospel music. I can tell what they mean because the music more than makes up for language’s ambiguity.
Ugh! I want to run away to somewhere warm and sunny where everyone eats fruit every day and there is no violence or hatred because we all love each other and sing together and fuck and the essence of life and wisdom fills the air like a honey-scented smog of fulfillment.
Er. . .that’s all for now.
As some of you know, I tried out for a new, second job within the company for which I already work. I just found out today, er yesterday (yes I know I need to fix my sleep schedule–that is the OLDEST hat), that I got it. It’s only on-call for now, but it may turn into a set schedule, which would be super nice. I start training on Wednesday and I am, as the kiddies don’t say, stoked. My fancy position title is a Wellness Services Coordinator and the Center, which provides hygeine and health services to homeless women, is actually in the basement of the apartment building where I work the front desk. I think this will be a really good, albeit perhaps challenging, experience, one that is excitingly closer to what I want to do with my life. Of course, since I care considerably more about how good I’ll be compared to my past occupations I’m also more nervous than I ever remember being. But hey, my boss suggested it to me in the first place, and she’s worked the very same position, so if she thinks I’ll be good at it I’ll just have to borrow some of her confidence on the matter. ¡También, más dinero= vengo, España!
I realize that is probably common knowledge, but I need frequent reminders. So, since I’m working the morning shift after a scant 3 hours of sleep and trying to keep myself encouraged, here are some various items of news that won’t crush your spirit:
Apparently there is now an inhalable form of insulin. Exubera, which is a fine powder that one huffs through a tube, was approved by the FDA this January and was welcomed onto the U.S. market this month. Interestingly, but not too surprisingly, it is Pfizer and Nektar Therapeutic’s love child.
While snooping around about insulin, I also found this article about an AIDS drug that Pfizer is going to release by the end of the year, which is both exciting and disappointing. I’m glad the big guns are behind an effective and less destructive AIDS treatment so that it will be well funded, promoted, and received, but I foresee major issues with making it available to those who need it most like our dying friend Africa.
The countdown for when a immunosupressantless life will be a possibility for transplant recipients is well under way, and although this isn’t new news to me, I like to occassionally hunt around for articles about it so I can get all excited and teary-eyed. I mean, wow! Let’s get on that train.
Hot damn do I love corn! We’re having a “corn feast” in the lobby at work right now and let me tell you: it is cornTASTIC! Also, apparently I am “base” for a game of tag some tenant’s kids are playing. Yes, it’s a tough job.
