Revised Terrifying Halloween Thoughts: Undergraduates

in the group "Young Conservatives of Texas" at Texas A&M (the school from which I obtained my own degree) hosted an "Anti-Obama Carnival" on a University Plaza. See the video below, and this link to some photos.

At least one of my friends/colleagues have commented that they are embarrassed to be an Aggie, but this strikes a different chord in me. I'm not embarrassed, I am, quite frankly, terrified. The YCT is a university level group of students who profess conservativism as a common orientation, and as an advocate for diversity and informative education on a spectrum of political beliefs, I take no issue with their right to peacefully assemble and promote their values. However, the concerns brought up in the video are compelling and thought-provoking points: the YCT's claim to the right to free speech and assembly is a right I strongly endorse; the point of the disparity between Obama's portrait and his policies as being egged is more than somewhat perturbing; and mostly--it was the defensiveness with which some students ("liberal" or "conservative", "republican" or "democrat" notwithstanding) reacted that speaks most clearly about the manner in which YCT was attempting to demonstrate its stance.

The anger and violence of the whole situation, and especially, its masquerading as a "carnival" is deeply chilling. Obama's head on a stick? (historical flashbacks to decapitated heads on spikes, anyone?) The act of throwing objects at someone's portrait? How far off is this from burning effigies? I understand and am well aware that violence is often a part of political demonstration; however I do not believe that it is ever necessary (cf Ghandi, Martin Luther King, blah blah blah). But I am not surprised at all at students' (even "conservative" students') reactions to the violence in Rudder plaza. And the most disturbing aspect? The "carnival" part of it. That it should not be a demonstration in which students are stolidly "standing up" for what they believe in (although in my very personal opinion, economic policies are a far cry from civil rights), but that it should be cast as a festival of merry-making, its flippancy and disrespect emphasized in the guise of pastimes, fun, a lark, is portentously alarming.

Caution, students; caution, Americans; caution, humans: what, exactly, is the intended message, and what, exactly is the message being received? In an effort to promote social responsibility, I strongly encourage mindfulness in the expression of opinions, values and beliefs. Sure, I have the right to say whatever I want, and almost however I want to say it. But I must remember, I also have the responsibility as a human(ist) to do my best to ensure that I am not marginalizing others by my expression.

Please be careful and safe this Halloween, and please consider others.

Halloween (of course)

This the most frightening thought: I said "yes" to this:

Disclaimer: I do love him. And find him incredibly attractive, even in this picture. Hrm. Must check meds.

Spoons and Such

The Utah Arts Festival this year was late June (actually I think it might always be), and it showcases phenomenal down-to-earth artists and artisans. It was hot, and our beers got warm, fast. But it was where I found something amazing (unfortunately, the website is still under construction). I found a tent, the walls of which were lined with wooden cooking utensils, spaced about every six inches. The personal healing (oh how we each have our issues) I found in the artistry of the attention with which each utensil was carved, polished, and named something quirky and specific, like "cranberry almond butter knife" not withstanding, I was overwhelmed by the experience. One man from Wyoming? Montana? (somewhere actually more desolate than Utah, at least in my imagination) imports wood from all over the world, and crafts each item himself, and he knew exactly where each was placed in his tent, and what wood it was made from. I asked for a pancake (he said "flapjack") spatula. He knew that he'd already just sold it earlier that day, but helped me find something that felt right in my hand. Anyway, without being hokey, check him out, if he finishes his website.

intermission

This is the week I move out of my apartment and into temporary housing (Thank God for Billie who has offered me her guest bedroom for all of a month or longer!) while I attempt to sell my car, all my possessions, and organize the rest of my life in the same fashion in preparation for moving, so please excuse an abbreviated entry. A picture for thought:

Una entrada menos pesada

Ok, ok, so Wednesday's entry was a wittow heavy, so something less so for the weekend:

In School Suspension: an Elementary Memory

Preface: so I only know one person who regularly reads my blog who will identify with all these specific memories, but here goes:

It must have been fourth grade. I had just come back to my Elementary school five houses away from my red-bricked one, my Elementary school teeming with white kids, having spent three years at Mahon Elementary on the East Side of town, where I was one of two white kids at least two of my years there. (First grade, it was just CJ Hargrove and me, and second grade, Dominic Zeni joined us. No idea why we were all there, the only white tiny faces on the "bad" side of town, but hell, I knew no color-boundaries. Especially since my parents pulled me out of my kindergarten class because my teacher Mrs. Cunningham? Cummings? would go bonkos if I colored "outside the lines" in our coloring book projects. Hrm...). Well to make a long story short, even though the Lubbock School District was busing for "integration" in 1993, they were busing class loads of kids, so that in third grade, the entire class was white, from the West Side of town, bused from Rush Elementary (fourth grade was from my home elementary Hardwick): kids whose last names began with L-Z. Lubbock might have been a tad bit behind on the whole "integration" thing, but I've heard that it didn't even begin until 1989. Whoa).

So, fourth grade, I had just come from the "bad" side of town, having spent the last three years in and out of the principal's office for various antics, but getting away with much too much because I was a "responsive" student (meaning: I read on a level two grades above mine, a highly prized commodity at Mahon. Not sayin' it was right, just sayin' how it was), and had entered Hardwick: middle-class Whitedom. Where I got in trouble. A lot.

I think at one point my teachers were just fed up with my talking incessantly in class, and running into the boys' bathroom, and asking to get a drink of water only to wander the halls and peek into the other classrooms. Anyway, I don't remember the last infraction, just that my folder had been signed enough times (oh the phrase "Anne, go get your folder" I heard so much, and most of the time, I thought unfairly) that I was deserving of ISS: oh yes: IN SCHOOL SUSPENSION, a place only kids like Charles Giddens were supposed to be on familiar terms with.

ISS was in a closet. Seriously. A supply closet, cleaned out of supplies, with room enough for three kids' desks and one adult's desk, although teachers were never in there. They just poked their heads in to make sure all was well. Which meant that most of the time we were drawing or talking in whispers, and only hastily scratched out our assignments when there were fifteen minutes left in the day. Oh yes, we were given ISS essay assignments. I remember mine was: Why You Shouldn't Go To ISS (or something like that).

I was a little bullshitter even then. I remember writing some cause-and-effect crap like "If I go to ISS, then I will not be in class to make good grades. If I do not make good grades, then I will not get a good job. If I do not get a good job, then I will end up flipping burgers my whole life." (Little did I know, that as an English-Major-To-Be, the flipping burgers part would probably be in my future regardless of my grades). Oh to be sure, the essay was more involved and descriptive, probably using vocabulary words of the fourth-grade equivalent to those in my bullshit French Revolution paper for my Senior year in High School (which were, specifically, "carnage," "bloodbath," "massacre," and some other over-the-top descriptors that had no place in an academic treatise, high school or not, even though that paper earned me an "A-" and a comment in green: "Very vivid imagery". Ha.), but more or less, it was a bunch of crap, and I knew it, even at age ten, or eleven, or whenever it was.

Actually, I think I was in ISS more than once. One time in sixth grade for letting someone have the answers to my homework, or a test, or something. I remember Mrs. Nugent being appalled, but hey man, I just wanted to share the knowledge! (or maybe I just wanted acceptance from my peers, or maybe I was a sellout. Who knows).

But the point is. A few days after my first ISS incident and the bullshit essay (having been completed, of course, in the last fifteen minutes of the day), I was in my federally funded, poorly nutritional valued lunch-food line (ah, another place I heard "Anne, go get your folder!" for once having said to Katie, about the re-fried beans under the hot lamps, "wow, those beans look like crap." Well, they did!), and Mrs. Carmona came up to me and said "I read your ISS essay, Anne. It was really good. Thank you for putting in the effort." And I glowed with the pride of a bullshitter having been commended on a half-ass job.

Apparently, though, as I was later told, other kids in ISS had done much more poorly on their essays. One turned in an entire sheet of wide-ruled paper that had written on it "SA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA SA" over and again.

Kudos, Anne Jones. Raising the bar, wherever she goes.

"Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine"

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver's poem is beautiful, and compassionate, and loving, although it stung much of "home again" and "family", and these are concepts I'm constantly struggling with, which may explain why my first reaction was quietly and sadly refutative, and reminded me one of the homeless kids I work with in Salt Lake who shakes his head when someone (stupidly) blanket statement tells him "It's gonna be ok." But the weird thing is: I DO believe "it's gonna be ok"--I wish I had written what Mary Oliver had. Instead, just an ekprhasis exercise:

It's funny
I have those things: the sun more than
half the year in these mountains
pebbled, undarked by elk hoof prints,
bearded with fir and ever whispering
aspens that stand slender tall
as I want to.
I have those things: rivers chuckling
between the beavers’ dams, those stream-
branches that giggling (and whatever else
the poets say that rivers do),
cut into my switchback trails.
I have that soft animal body too.
Never firm enough
despite my fish-and-rice-and-running-regi-
men. And I have that flat deserted despair,
crawling, as my too loose ligaments only able,
toward some deictic orientation
that wavering mirage.

Civic Privilege

Duty schmooty. It was my privilege to drive 1.2 hours on Friday to the Summit County seat here: to register myself to vote in this election. The drive was scenic: and a little tiny-town-middle-of-nowhere-America-ish: but hey, that's what America's about. Right? Right??

(honestly? I have no idea. I'm just a-postin' purty pictures).

Small Town (see first picture)

So the news is, I am entered into a betrothal.

The hilarity is timeline:
***Tuesday approx 5.30pm, roof of Salt Lake City Library, one John R. Nelson asks one Anne W. Jones to marry him. Anne answers in the affirmative.
***Tuesday approx 7pm, curbside drop off of Salt Lake City Airport, one aforementioned AWJ drops off one aforementioned JRN for his 8pm flight back to the city of Chicago, IL.
***Tuesday 7pm until 10pm, the dungeon of a studio apartment in Pinebrook, Park City, UT, AWJ relates the aforementioned events to her immediate family.
***Wednesday, approx 12noon at 804 Main St, suite 100, AWJ informs her employers of her news and pending resignation.
... ... ...

***Thursday, approx 9.43am at 804 Main St, suite 100, the UPS guy brings in a package for which he asks AWJ to sign.
***Thursday, approx 9.44am the UPS guy bursts out with "Congratulations! I heard you were engaged." ....

Feelings of horror at the small-town nature of Park City and the bizarreness of nameless UPS guy knowing the intimacies of her personal affairs flood AWJ.

Which is why she has decided to move to Chicago. (see second picture)

future city memory

Fuck

(My newspaper stale, and sinkwater running)
This one pads around the tangled sheets lumpy
piles of too-quick-shed jeans and missing socks,
cigarette wobbling, stuck to her lower lip
and the occasional flicker of her inhales:
a blush in the not-yet-morning.
(My coffee's not strong enough)
Man's wallet in her hands, the bills between
yellowstained fingers, pocketed, she drifts
out: (two floors down I hear his door creak shut
from my frontside window watch her
ash my porch, off towards the corner bus stop,
my pancake soggy but I'm sure) he's
still sleeping beer-heavy at sunrise.

October Snow

Just as an update: Park City, Utah got hit by a snowstorm this weekend. Traipsing through three inches of snow on the trail that I was supposed to be running this Sunday was only somewhat amusing when I remembered that it's only October. Barely.

Most of Sunday morning, however, was spent bundled up and hanging over from Sarah's 24th birthday, for which there was so much surplus booze that we are still drinking it. It is well noted that this never happened in college--people stingier, booze scarcer, maybe just friends were drunker. However, with a quarter-keg of home brew, a couple of cases of Dos Equis, two bottles of champange, four bottles of wine, mixed drinks and shots to go around for all eight guests attending, we, um, we managed to hold our own. Happy Birthday Sarah!

And more to come on Park City weather, as it changes.

unghosted memory (with a little help)

Photo: day two in Playa del Carmen. Annie and Sarah reach the outside world at 1pm, surprisingly not hideous for hanging over. It might have been the sweet Mexican sea air. Which I miss. So now I monitor some form of Metabolic Support:

my metabolic statement: I vitamin my arteries,
SMTWTFS each unassuming box lids three large pills
that smell of hay. one for balance, one for immunity.
the last softens my arteries for good measure.

And two tiny silent ones, pinkly sour taste, pocketed for dissolution-
under-tongue emergencies, that constant Absence.

Processed Food

Nah, I plant my own potatoes.
They root themselves, you know.
Stem storage organs, they'll grow
even
in a water jar, warm kitchen windowsill
but prefer the quiet under earth
for soft hymns undirged.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (untitled)

I WAKE and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

unimpressive aerial views

Kelly and I biked this route yesterday. Well. She biked. I ran. Some fifty minutes or so. Was only 700 vertical feet, but who knows how many miles. We're making the best of the last of the weather and sunshine; there was snow on the peaks yesterday, and frost on all the fields this morning (this is not a good sign for my Seasonal Affective Disorder).


After the run, I came home and holed myself up in my 440 sq ft. Studio. Winter-style, with tea and a chicki-patti from MorningStarFarms. This does not bode well for my long winter. Or my brain. I can feel it lumping up already from fat-storing-winter-hibernation.

I *did* find out, however, that non-motorvehicle owners can pay only $20 a month to be insured. This is tempting.

reinforced plans for expatriation

natural decadence

Wilde's Symphony in Yellow

An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly,
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.

Big barges full of yellow hay
Are moored against the shadowy wharf,
And, like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.

The yellow leaves begin to fade
And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale green Thames
Lies like a rod of rippled jade.

outstanding pricipl balance

I found an ear
bended
an easyflown canal
curren-
-sea of murmurs re
leased of debt and
silence

October