quotes

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives."

-Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not A Luxury

quotes

Dorothy Allison says that the early Feminist movement changed her life. "It was like opening your eyes under water. It hurt, but suddenly everything that had been dark and mysterious became visible and open to change."


http://www.dorothyallison.net/

read these three books: Trash, Bastard Out of Carolina, Skin: talking about sex, class and literature.

crush and crushing depression

Sascha says on the phone to me - we each have our stories that we repeat over and over.

It's true and our stories are similar - the letting someone fall in love with us who we know we're going to hurt, then feeling shitty and falling for someone who will never love us how we deserve. I don't want to repeat the story forever, and I don't think we have to.

It is one thing to see the story, and then another thing entirely to unlearn it and write a new script.

Here is what I am trying to do:
1. recognize what it's about - like how I like to be either in control and safe that way, or totally out of control and safe again, in a different way. the familliarly safe feeling of wanting more than I'll ever get. I know I won't get it. safe. sucks.

2. what is it about the out of control? what is it that is similar in the people who make me feel that way?
there is a thing in it about masculinity and ego, butch players and bad boys. wanting famous eyes to fall on me, to pick me, to count me special.

3. what is it inside of me that holds that part?
Inside me there is this too - this person who I neglect. and it's a little more boring to make inner peace than to look for it out there, so maybe a little of both.

Instead of beating myself up for repeating this story, I say - thanks for letting this in to my life, for letting me feel this way. this crazy way of crush. thanks for letting me some insight into this pattern. Maybe I will still repeat it, but maybe I'll be on a spiral out, on a further tragectory out of the spring loaded place that holds this need.

so if I was good good good I would go to a yoga class, forget the crush, get grounded, talk to my inner butch, but I don't really want to. There are reasons for this defense, this fun thing. so I compromise.
I will go get a vest, a tie, some boy glasses. I will nurture that inside part some, let him out.

4. also, what project can I work on when I can't think and can't write? Draw, interview people. In this whirlwind between crush and crushing depression, the most important thing is to keep something in my life that is worthwhile and outside my head.

journal

Carefree AZ.
It is so sad to me the way people grow old in america, so many people. this loneliness and isolation. My grandma saying it's not fair, still being alive after her husband died. My grandpa. A few weeks ago. No funeral. There is such close feelings, deep sadness and new love. That can't eat feeling and can't focus and hard time sleeping. I am pretending to have new love, but it is makebelieve, faking to cover up something else I don't want to feel.

How do you mourn someone who you never really loved? but maybe grew to love a little bit in this last year. someone who did nothing while the daughtors were beat and abused. Wash your hands of it. Wash your hands of bad memories and eachother.

I never understood my family, the way they didn't look out for eachother. The sickness inside all of them. I wanted a different kind of family, still do, bigger than me and my sister and her partner. I want the family promise of punk and feminism, the promise that I can't seem to ever quite get a grasp on, and is it me, am I washing my hands when other people are holding close? or is it just the incideousness of capitalism and individualism and isolation that is so fucking hard to break out of.

The sadness is the sadness for a whole generation of my family, and for me, and for my dead mom. The sadness is for being so scared I won't create something better after all.

quotes

"People are really, realy hungry to feel some hope about anything. The simple idea that because of challenges people face with the environment, over the next 40 years things must change is daunting. But if you say it's a great opportunity (for this generation) to build a new civilization - that generates hope. We've spent the last two decades being so discouraged and detached, that need to feel some hope is a latenet urge that has been long neglected. In the end there is no practical alternative to hope. Only a certain proportion of people are montivated by despair. The rest of us are motivated by hope."

(I ripped this out of the paper and forgot who it was quoting)