my complicated relationship with my home state & family

where and with whom i grew up is a tough thing for me. both of my parents grew up pretty poor. i have no shame about that and i don’t think they do either (though i could be wrong; i should ask). but it seemed clear to me growing up that they made every effort they could to put my brother and i on fast tracks to success. we lived in middle-class neighborhoods and even owned a pretty large 3- or 4-bedroom house near the end of my high school days. i still remember our living room being large enough that i could play hacky sack with a friend with no problem.

all that to say, i grew up in pretty white neighborhoods with well resourced, “good schools.” i was often one or two or three black students in my class or grade level. i read a lot, was good at math, did martial arts, and played violin and trombone. i was little and a nerd.

i say all this to say, i didn’t really fit in. i was a floater (as are many of the people i associate with now, interesting trend…). i had friends at all the lunch tables because i didn’t really feel that comfortable identifying with any single group all the time. i was too white for most of the black kids (“well-spoken,” “smart,” the usual coded supremacist language targeted at nonwhite young people to make them realize that they can’t be whatever they are AND things characterists that belong to white people), too little for the sports kids (tae kwon do doesn’t count as a real sport), and too nerdy for the cool kids (why did i make such a point of reading all the books on our classroom reading lists?).

i can look at all this stuff now through an oppression analysis and it all makes sense. but those early years of developing a strong relationship with my family and physical home didn’t really happen for me. we also didn’t visit my parent’s families that often. maybe a couple of times a year and i remember not having fun most of the time (most of my extended family still lives around where my parents grew up).

it’s also really hard to be home for me because my dad is a pastor and the black church is still mostly homophobic. case in point: this happened literally days ago: kim burrell goes on a pulpit tirade against homosexuality.

as a result, i have very weak ties to physical home and family and left florida as soon as possible (freshman year of college). i shipped off to boston, oh oh oh…

but now, largely as a result of my deepening analysis, i know that i need to connect to my family and my history/past. my work through infinite growth has also reminded me that family can be a mutually beneficial resource if you put the work in. i didn’t do that when i was young, but it’s never too late.

anyways, all of this is a lead up to say that when i went home for this past winter break, i heard some things from my dad and aunt and grandma that remind me that who i am is shaped by people in my family, even if i’m unaware of it.

examples:

• i whistle a lot (and pretty well). when whistling around my dad’s house, he said, “wow boy, you whistle just like your grandma ruth. she loved to whistle.” i never wished my grandma was still alive more than that moment. i wonder if i got that from her during the days we spent with her when i was young.
• i love eating double-stuf oreos before bed. one night before bed while standing in the kitchen, i watched my dad pull down a package of golden oreos and dunk some in water (he’s lactose-intolerant) before bed.
• i stay busy and i travel a lot. mama brown (my play grandma) said on the phone to me, “dang you and yo daddy are just alike. can’t nobody hold y'all down.”
• i didn’t drink til i was 21 but now i drink maybe 4 drinks a week. i had forgotten this (even though it shaped why i didn’t drink til i was 21), but my dad has two siblings who died in alcohol-related incidents. the more brutal of the two cases was my uncle. he was drunk one night, picked a bar fight with the wrong people, was followed out of the bar by them, and then beaten up and thrown onto some railroad tracks to be hit by a train. one of my dad’s other brothers had to i.d. the body and hasn’t really been the same since.

so yea. family and home are tough for me, but i think i need to change that. when and how quickly i don’t know, but i’ll figure that out as it goes.

ps - this is the most public i’ve been about this ever. i hope it doesn’t blow up in my face or backfire somehow. i also didn’t really go back and edit this one at all (need to get going to work!). hopefully it’s coherent. or not. whatever. done better than perfect.

writing: 23:00
​spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 1:01

why anger is so bad and how mindfulness could be a solution

near the middle of this episode, the two interviewees and krista are talking through why anger is so bad. 

“I think, physically as well as emotionally, we instinctively — I can certainly speak for myself in this — recoil from the reality of feeling vulnerable or afraid, right? And so we layer — I mean, anger gets layered on top of that because it feels like a more powerful response. But then we stop being able to tell the difference ourselves, right? You stop knowing, “I’m scared.” You say, “I’m angry.”i think the way krista said it is dead on. anger that isn’t dealt with properly masks our other emotions. anger often makes us unable to see what we’re actually feeling. our anger can hide something more fundamental like fear or confusion.” - krista tippet, on being: meeting our enemies and our suffering (with sharon salzberg and robert thurman)

anger is a natural response; maybe an outdated evolutionary one, but natural nonetheless. sharon salzberg mentioned just a little earlier that anger does have use. it’s a strong reaction and, if harnessed, can be used very productively. audre lorde’s essay on the uses of anger is a great thought piece for that.

but in today’s world, what i’m wondering is about how to deal with anger in the day to day. somewhere later in the episode, one of the three offers mindfulness as a solution to mindless anger. mindfulness can help us slow down enough to identify exactly what we’re feeling and why. anger tends to not be spontaneous so being mindful creates the ability to slow down enough to identify the cause of the anger. then we can respond to the real issue instead of the anger and maybe even find a way to harness that hot heat of anger that lorde discusses and use it as an engine for productive action.

writing: 13:50
​spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 9:01

disordered loves in america

“And so I go to Augustine’s concept of “disordered loves” which is we all love a lot of things, and we all know some loves are higher than others. Our love of truth should be higher than our love of money, but because of some screw-up in our nature, we get our loves out of order all the time. So if a friend blabs to you a secret and you tell it at a dinner party, you’re putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship, and that’s a sin. And I think, in this world, which doesn’t like to peer darkly into brokenness, it’s easier to swallow the concept of two positive things that are out of order.” — david brooks, on being: sinfulness, hopefulness, and the possibility of politics

unsurprisingly (because i love st. augustine and was once torn between an augustinian and franciscan monk), i love this idea of “disordered loves.” i grew up in a religious household and the idea of sin was everywhere. but because of how the american progressives (older white people and younger poc & white people alike) have, by and large, rejected religion, sin isn’t really a useful construct.

however, disordered love seems very useful. it’s a concept that helps explain why things are broken. examples brooks gave: love for money over love for people. love of popularity over love of friendship. another one i see often is love of comfort over love of planet.

this concept is easier to understand in our society because we struggle to think of things we like as bad. it makes us feel bad. and, unfortunately, feeling bad is a trigger for shutdown of engagement for most of us. of course, that is a problem all its own that needs change, but let’s take it as a given for now.

if “putting our loves in order” is a useful frame for making things better, i’m into it. i really like that idea. it even allows for tough love as a mechanism for helping each other put our loves in better order. when we allow tough love or “fierce compassion” as buddhists might say (mentioned by robert thurman in the on being episode called meeting our enemies and our suffering), we get new opportunities for engagement. loving fiercely (in that cornell west “just is what love looks like in public” sort of way) gives us new ways of bringing different people into our work. because as a call to action, who  doesn’t want to love more?

and this isn’t the watered down version of love fed to us by destructive media sources. this is the type of love that makes us understand and hold each other as we open our eyes and have our world views shattered. this is the type of love that makes us put some skin in the game for each other. this is the type of love that makes us really understand that our liberation is bound up with people different from us.

maybe that’ll be my frame for 2017: getting these loves in order…

writing: 21:22
​spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 11:12

i really hate corporate sellouts (simple, this time)

once again, an app that i heard about, started to use, and fell in love with has sold out to a larger, older entity. simple, which used to be a super slick mobile-only banking service, was bought by bbva compass: fluff piece #1 (which mentions “new features” that were announced almost a month earlier) fluff faq. in the process, they’ve lost the spark that set them apart for me.

vision statement

Short

My top-level values are love, justice, and community. My other values are self-determination, equity, and freedom.