A Day of Serendipity

My biggest complaint when I eventually meet the man upstairs is going to be that there just weren't enough hours in a day for a person to really live. I slogged through work (granted my job isn't the living hell so many others seem to have to suffer), made it to 5 pm and I was out the door to go to a class, which I had to sneak out on early to head to Wallingford for the monthly Amnesty meeting. I got to fight back tears as I listened to the speakers describe human rights abuses by the Chinese state against the people of Tibet. The meeting ended around nine, and by this point I was buzzing on a triple latte and simply NOT ready for my usual bedtime. With empty paper cup in hand I walked over to 15th Ave to wait for the 48 bus, and as I got to the stop I saw an older black man leaning against a garbage can, slightly hunched over. He appeared to be dozing off. As I went behind him to throw my paper cup away I noticed a weathered-looking leather bag plugging the hole where the opening to the trash can was supposed to be. I awkwardly cleared my throat and asked him in a friendly voice if the bag was his. He woke up. He moved his bag. We had a conversation. I was in for a shock, though, because the man with the leather bag was Zaid Abdul-Aziz, former pro basketball player for the Sonics.

I wound up heading home with a signed copy of his recent book in my hand and a whole slew of incredible stories. Hearing them made my mind spin.
"You are truly an accomplished man," I said.
"No, no," he laughed, shaking his head. "I'm just a brother from Brooklyn." I replied that if I ever make anything out of this life I suppose I had better remember to tell everyone that I'm just a sister from Seattle.

As I got on the bus, he asked me if he could be completely honest. I said sure.
"You're not like other Asians!"
Huh?
"They do this little jog when they see me. They run away. And they don't even know me. You didn't do that little jog."
I really wasn't sure what to say to that. What do you do when you see another human being who is just trying to live? Just like you?

I'm coming to realize myself as the oddball who fearlessly talks to every stranger on the street. Most of the time this is really not a bad thing. But I suppose I should be a bit more careful lest I find myself in a situation where that little jog might become necessary.

By the way, you should know about this terrific coffee shop on 2nd Ave called the Mosaic, located in the basement of a church with excellent espresso and run entirely by guilt-driven donations. Okay, with Amnesty hosting its meetings there now, LOTS and LOTS of guilt-driven donations.

The End of Outside

I finally managed to hit the wall today during my first 4.2 miler around Greenlake in weeks. Weary of staying mired in my toxic state for so long, I laced up and went outside, and once I started I couldn't really stop...for one thing, I credit the fact that I'm eating again, but really just getting myself out the door simply to face the world seemed to take forever. I'm slowly coming to the realization though that it wasn't the world I was avoiding but myself. I'm almost afraid of another mental or physical roadblock that might prevent me from continuing to move.

A little voice in my head -- and I know for a fact that it's not the one I've been hearing for the past few weeks -- tells me to keep moving. Hard as it is, I'm learning to listen to that one instead.

Today, unlike the other times I've run, I didn't take music with me. But for whatever reason I had Duncan Sheik's "The End of Outside" going through my head all the way around the lake and back to my doorstep:

Should I say I'm sorry, for what I'm going to say
I guess it's way beyond me,
to sleep with yesterday
I want to see my future
I want to know my past
The everlasting present
Is that so much to ask?

The Illusion of Ownership

I've been reading the first volume of Derrick Jensen's tome Endgame for the past week. I am certain that I agree with his premise, but am not so comfortable with his prescription. He argues among other things that civilization as we know it is killing the planet (this is a definite duh, but significant nonetheless). He says that all nonviolent means of attempting to undermine or alter the course of a fundamentally undemocratic and physically destructive system is like "using the master's tools to take down the master's house," which is simply not a realistic proposition. He says that the only way we can confront the system is to quit waffling and just destroy it. I'm not sure if I agree with him yet.

But I agree with him on a great many things already; especially his critique of property ownership in a society based on capitalist consumption. Consumption wouldn't be possible without the seizure, destruction and conversion of the natural world into products to be bought and sold at a price in the market. The rules of the market are such that power flows in specific directions, intuitively based upon what each of us want or need. "The premise of private property," says Jensen, "is that each of us has something that someone else needs or wants. In a society based on private property rights, those who are able to accrue more of what others need or want have greater power. By extension, they wield greater control over what others perceive as needs and desires, usually in the interest of increasing profit to themselves." Makes good sense. Elsewhere in the book: " To want to close the [Mexican] border to people yet leave it open to the theft of their resources (importation is the preferred term in polite society), is to show that your alleged concern over population is nothing but the same old bigotry and exploitation. I don't want you, but I do want the coffee grown on land that used to be yours.

What struck me while reading this is that we leave admission of the primacy of resources out of our political discourse. "Notice the language," says Jensen. "Overpopulation, zero population growth. How different would it be if we spoke instead of overconsumption and zero consumption growth? This shift wouldn't happen, of course, because zero consumption growth would destroy the capitalist economy."

We have indeed become experts at shrouding our everyday speech to the point of impotency. We do this in ways that only make sense to us because even the slightest shift in wording would awaken us to the reality that the changes we are failing to make on a large scale are linked to the suffering of millions across the globe. Live and let live, we keep saying. What's mine is mine and what's yours is yours. But what if what's mine was never rightfully acquired in the first place? What must I do to ensure that the process of acquisition doesn't harm others? Do we dare quit hiding behind the statistics of population growth or sustainable development and look at the damage caused by the economic way of looking at the world?

Politics > People.

That was some serious emotion behind the immigration bill that tanked in the Senate today. Setting aside the obvious effort on the part of the President to salvage what credibility he's lost with Americans because of his failures in Iraq by approving this bill, it is perhaps the one measure backed by him recently that I actually found sufficient reason to support. Which is why I was puzzled by Democrats when they started sounding off all these populist-sounding concerns about mistrust of government and how the American people wouldn't buy it even if the president delivered on his promises of tightened border-security and amnesty for illegal workers. It's a plausible concern: would the promises of the measure have materialized? While it's hard to say, any bit of hope for illegal workers and their families got sacrificed on the altar of power politics. It cut two ways.

1. Dems used it as yet another excuse to make Bush look like an ass. (Like this was even really necessary).
2. We're racist and who can't face up to the fact that we don't want to share our resources and rights with people whom we don't perceive as deserving to belong here.

Try as it will, Congress can't escape the 8 pound gorilla in the room. Which means that this issue gets blissfully frozen for the time being only to start up again at fever pitch once the problem get so big as to threaten to swallow us whole. Ignoring it seems tantamount to coping with an illness by pretending that it's simply going to go away.

Why We Shouldn't Ignore the Poor

I had an interesting encounter with a man on the street this evening. I'd just gotten out of an appointment with my therapist/counselor after an hour of rehashing old childhood memories which could be used to explain some of my current struggles, some of which were so painful to dig up that I'd spent the whole last hour suffering from a bout of leaky-faucet syndrome. At any rate, I guess I wasn't looking my hottest after that, but I was pretty dry-eyed by the time I'd hit the street so as not to announce to the whole world that I was feeling like crap. Pioneer Square being the characteristically poor neighborhood it is, I reacted with no surprise when a young black man in a baseball t-shirt walked up to me and asked me if I could spare some.
"Two dollars?" he asked. His accent I couldn't quite put a finger on.
"I'm sorry, I don't have any cash on me right now." (I truly didn't). "Plus I just started working after 6 months without a steady job, so I feel ya. Sorry."
"Let me tell you something about money," he said. Oh god, a penny lecture from a homeless person who thinks he's better than all the money grubbing status-hounds who trounce through downtown after work. "Money carries you, that's all it does. If you handle it just right, it lifts you up and gets you where you need to go. And I really hope you get there."
I blinked. That certainly was not what I had expected to come out of his mouth. Who was this person?
"You've nice eyes," he said. "If I had your eyes, I'd cry every day."
"What's your name?" I asked. Now I was smiling.
"Vladimir."
"I hope you get there too. It's funny you say that. I was just crying a little while ago." The faucet already was leaking.
"Maybe we'll meet in heaven, then," he replied, reaching out to give me a hug. "Just love, girl. You'll conquer the world."
And you already have, Vladimir. You already have.

Paranoia, Paranoia, The Mexicans are Coming to Get Me...

Funny how the very same critics of the 9/11 conspiracy theory, however kooky it all is, seem just as apt to bake up their own crazy stories. Kookiness, it seems, is perfectly capable of emanating from both sides of the political fence.

~From Mother Jones, May/June 2007:

The Conspiracy: Secret plans are afoot to merge the United States into an E.U.-like union with Canada and Mexico. The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, a trade agreement being discussed between George W. Bush and our neighbors, is actually a cover for a soon-to-be-formed single North American Union. Dollars and pesos will be replaced with a new North American currency called the "Amero." The new "superstate" would erase the current borders, leading to a flood of former Mexicans into the region once known as the United States.

The Conspiracy Theorists: Jerome Corsi, coauthor of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, who's managed to enlist the sympathies of Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist, anti-immigration Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado), and Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Virginia) -- who introduced a bill last September stating the United States should not enter into said North American Union.

Meanwhile, back on earth: The SPP is real, but it's a run-of-the-mill free-trade program along the lines of NAFTA. The idea for a single North American currency has been floated by academics, but that's it. Kookiness Rating (1 = maybe they're onto something; 5 = break out the tinfoil hat): 4~~

I've been thinking lately about the concept of walls. Projects are obviously underway to fence off the southern border. (Forget about the much wealthier and non-threatening whites residing behind the northern one). The sense of impending doom that would trigger such an effort is what I cannot understand. But the very same ethos of irrational fear that is erecting walls between nations is what is fueling theories such as this. Irrational fear leads to paranoia, and once mixed with policy and implemented, can bring unnecessary economic and social strife on both ourselves and on our neighbors. Seeing the work of the Border Patrol, the National Guard members assisting them and the Minutemen who think neither are doing a sufficient job, I think there's plenty enough reason to think that concerns like these might well fall under the category of biggest crock of shit we've ever seen or heard.

Living with the Guys

Ahhhh, weekends…slipped back into two straight days of sleeping until noonish to cure a sleep deficit generated over the course of one week by a funky work schedule combined with frighteningly excessive coffee-drinking. Saturday’s somnolent bliss was followed by (yep) coffee in Capital Hill with Jason, who lately seems adamant about helping me improve my Japanese. Not that I can necessarily complain, being that completion of my degree depends on it. He’s pretty good at reminding me when I forget.

Following several years of feeling a bit locked in an antisocial cave I guess I can honestly admit the complex interaction with a whole new cast of characters in my life is a welcome blast of fresh air. The only difference now is that these people are not some illusion during one of my bouts of wishful thinking. With them I find myself going out for bubble tea, learning how to cook vegetarian, taking pictures the right way, staring at open skies, playing with a delightfully fluffy & feisty cat and figuring out how to hold my own in an intellectual argument based on logic. Beyond the fact that these two amazing men have welcomed me temporarily into their home during a period of huge transition, I’m pretty much happier now than I can really say I’ve ever been.

So here's what I can tell with regards to the present state of things:

The karma jar is full. I’m massively indebted. Life is good. Really good.

I'm Baaaaackkk...

Seeing as I’ve logged a gazillion hours on the internet without adding even a word to my name ever since I told myself I’d start blogging back in January, I figure now is as good a time as any to follow through. Whether I really have anything deep or “important” to tell anyone, I guess, really isn’t the point – plus who is to define what is deep or important anyway? Put simply, readers can see this one of two ways: (1) a means of maintaining some small purgative measure of sanity in the midst of chaos/the rat race/whatever one might call it (also known as the supposedly *grown up* realm of the capitalist work/spend treadmill, replete with graying temples and thickening middles) (2) on a purely selfish and very personal level, a self-tracking measure to keep myself motivated and on my toes.

To political theorists, environmentalists, poets, philosopher-poets and seekers of intellectual solace, I hope these ramblings are halfway decent fodder for spirited debate or at least good conversation. :) As far as my own purposes, it's is that this effort will help to stop likening my reclusive self to the student who says, “I’ll start writing my paper. Tomorrow.”

Another point which bears mentioning: SCREW cultivating a readership!

My goals would much more consist of such things as:
1. Making much ado about crap most people ignore or dismiss as petty (i.e., stories of our homeless, the nonsense behind the pricing and labeling of canned foods and such).
2. Exploring the world of ideas in the company of kindred minds.
3. Figuring out what it’s like to be awake!