Just who is the five o-clock hero?

21 09 2010

I lost out on a job; I am so relieved.

I shouldn’t be: I should be freaking out. Yes, I’m still teaching, but that covers rent, nothing more. And I do have a bit of money in the bank, but not enough for me to be relieved instead of freaking out.

So why aren’t I freaking out?

One obvious reason is that I didn’t want the job. It’s at the same place I’ve been working, so I know people there, I like the organization well enough, and it’s an easy commute. Oh, and the job would have been fine, too.

I just didn’t want it. The pay would have been okay, and the work conditions not-onerous, and there are parts of the job I think I would have enjoyed. But I was worried—worried—that I’d be offered the position, and stuck in a sideways corporate position which was more comfortable than challenging. Yes, I could have paid for things besides rent with this job—no small thing, and why I would have felt I had to take it, had it been offered to me—but jesusmaryandjoseph did I move to New York City for. . . this?

Okay, so that’s over the top, and completely unfair to the job itself. But I did take risks to move here (some of which I’m still trying to pay off in the not-rent portion of my financial obligations), and at some point it seems a waste of that risk to settle for something merely because it’s safe.

Easy for me to say, I know: I don’t have a partner or kids or a mortgage, and safety and settling matter when there are people relying upon you. Risk calculation changes when you’re responsible for someone else.

I am responsible for no one else. Whether that’s good or bad matters less than the bare fact of it itself, which means if I am to take responsibility for myself, then I need to pay attention not just to my bank account, but to the whole of my life.

Truth be told, I’m not very good at that, and too often anxiety and fear cloud my sensibilities and make me uneasy to try—to risk—what I may actually be able to do.

This 9-5 job would have been a respectable reason for me to hold off on those risks, on those efforts, and I have no good faith that those efforts will pay off.

But Christ, all that it took to bring me here: isn’t it time to take a deep breath and go?

***

And on that point: listen to and enjoy Poi!


Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Categories : Musing

The expulsion from the Garden of Eden is the beginning of life as I know it

19 09 2010

I’m a little fuzzy on the whole sin thing.

Yes, something about disobeying God, with apples, snakes, naked people, banishment, knowledge. . . really, if I were religious, I’d surely find this all fascinating, but as I’m not, well, it just seems curious to me.

But one thing I do like about the insistence on the sinfulness of humans is that those propounding on this corruption tend to see it as all-inclusive: Everyone is a sinner, everyone needs grace.

Handy to remember that.

I’d circled this issue in the last two posts, in terms of Christians and TeePers behaving badly, but one of the things I was too angry (!) to deal with in the Wars-of-Religion post and too politically-minded to deal with in confronting Howard Beale is my basic belief that almost all of us carry almost all of the possible characteristics any human being can demonstrate. The proportions may vary, sure, but outside of the exceptional few, I think we’re all capable of the same basic range of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

This doesn’t make us all the same: there are clearly differences in the mix, as well as what each of us brings to that mix in terms of conscious effort and habituation.

Oh, crap, I’m getting too windy.

Lemme put it this way: I didn’t post the extensive quote about rampaging Christians (in response to Peretz’s claim that ‘Muslim life is cheap, especially to Muslims’) as a way of saying See! It’s not just Muslims! Christians are bad, too! Boos, all around! No, the point—which I didn’t explicitly make—is that people behaving violently in the name of religion is unsurprising, given that people are capable of behaving violently.

Yes, there are belief systems which explicitly forbid violence, but the existence of pacifist belief systems proves the point: If the adherents weren’t themselves capable of violence and aggression, there’d be little need for a system to discipline them.

Again, another capacity of humans: to restrain ourselves from doing all that we can possibly do.

But why restrain or indulge? What leads Christians in one period to slaughter one another and non-Christians and in another to tolerate and even respect them? What leads Muslims to laud or condemn conquest? What makes rightists or leftists righteously angry and what will they do with that righteousness and anger?

Ask the question instead of assuming the answer.

It’s too easy to say Christians are peaceful and Muslims aggressive (or vice versa), or rightists are patriotic and leftists traitors (or vice versa), especially when the historical evidence indicates otherwise. Nor is it enough to say that x-behavior isn’t representative of true belief, especially when—again—evidence indicates that x-behavior in another time or place was treated as the sine qua non of true belief.

Do you feel the breeze? Sorry, getting windy again.

I just don’t think we humans are better or worse than we were before, nor that we can even define better or worse outside of a particular historical context. Best simply to try to understand what we  mean by these terms, and to recognize what we are capable of.

For better and for worse.

***

Addendum: Perhaps this also the case for other creatures, and how we act towards and respond to them.


Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , ,
Categories : Musing

I’m not angry!

19 09 2010

I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!

Entertaining scene.

You do know, of course, that Howard Beale is a nutjob.

That doesn’t mean he makes no sense whatsoever. I happen to like the declaration I’m a human being, goddammit, and my life has value! And as a jolt to complacency (steel-belted radials. . . ) well, here’s a common quaking ground between an agitated left and agitated right.

Anger has its uses, of course, precisely in that jolting kind of way—it can get one moving out of passivity and into action—so it’s a start, a propeller, an accelerant, spark and fuel. Fine. But it’s a shitty engine.

Which is to say, it’s a shitty politics.

I’m not a fan of the Tea Party folk (surprise!), but that kind of raging rhetoric can be found all over the political spectrum. I get it, I really do—I was known in college for yelling at the news and once smeared butter all over the dorm-lounge t.v. because I didn’t like what I was witnessing—so I understand what it’s like to be electrified by what one considers to be lies, distortions, and general injustice. (And yes, I still yell at the radio, tho’ I keep the butter in the fridge.)

But that ain’t enough; even Howard Beale noted that after everyone gets angry, ‘then we’ll figure out what to do. . . .’

So what will the Tea Party do? Christine O’Donnell, TP-GOP nominee for the Delaware senate seat, said in a speech to the Value Voters Summit that whatever the disagreements among Republicans,  “we’re loud, we’re rowdy, we’re passionate.” And Sharron Angle, the Nevada TeePer senate candidate, has spoken of recourse to the 2nd Amendment if her kind don’t get their way. Is this where the anger ends?

But what if you win, what will you do? Ms. O’Donnell notes that all of her votes will be decided on the basis of the Constitution; does she know that tax increases, spending increases, unbalanced budgets, unfunded wars, and international treaties are all Constitutional? Does Ms. Angle realize that supporting the military, cutting spending, extending Bush-era tax cuts, and paying down the national debt does not compute?

This isn’t just snarking on incoherent campaign platforms—it is a campaign, after all, and as long as you reel in votes, anything goes—but noting that these two campaigns, at least, seem to be less about any policy and more about stickin’ it to The Man.

And once that Man is dead (he won’t be, of course, you remember how Network, ends, don’t you?), then what?

Once your anger is slaked, then what? Or is the point the anger, after all?


Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : Musing

Between the pen and the paperwork

12 09 2010

I finally did it.

After clearing out the 4 boxes and separating the recorded from the unrecorded articles, I piled up all the recorded articles  until I figured out what to do with them.

All that work—years worth of work—and the one, great, broken promise that those articles collectively represented sat in my small hallway, just outside of my bedroom. For months.

Yesterday, I went through the stacked meter of them one last time, pulled out a few to offer to my bioethics students, and carried the rest to the recycling bin. Today they were gone.

I still have about another foot left; these are the articles to be entered into my database and then, like the others, taken away. And there are still the hard copies of all those Human Genome Reports, the reports from DOE and NIH and NHGRI and OTA, along with some number of articles that I couldn’t quite part with; perhaps by the time I move again I’ll have figured out how to toss these, as well.

It’s not that big of deal, I tell myself. All of this is available online, either through the CUNY library system or, if I ever remember to join the Wisconsin Alumni Association, through the UW library system. It’s all still there, not gone at all.

But it feels like waste: a waste of paper, a waste of a career. All of this work I gathered (or which was gathered for me—thanks R.!) was to have led me further into an academic life, one in which I built a political theory of bioethics, taught medical and graduate students, participated in colloquia and conferences, and secured myself inside a tenured professorship.

Didn’t happen. Obviously.

I held on to those articles, nonetheless, never quite sure of when I might—might—need them again. After all, I’m still teaching, and who knows when that Theoretical Medicine or Human Gene Therapy or Philosophical Nursing piece might be exactly what I need. I once needed them, or at least, once thought I needed them; so who knows. . . .

I know: I don’t. They’ve been a kind of heavy security blanket, boxes of files I’d carted with me from Montreal to Somerville to (storage locker to storage locker in) Brooklyn. I’m done, I said, as I refused to get rid of all that with which I was done.

So about a year ago I decided it was time. I did nothing. Then I said, Hey, I have a file of all of those articles, so it’s not like I’m losing access to everything. I did nothing. Then I disinterred them from the boxes, sorted through them, piled them a meter high in the small hallway outside of my bedroom. Where they sat. Until yesterday.

It felt good to get rid of the clutter. I have pack-ratish tendencies, but I love the relief of unburdening myself of unnecessities.

It just took awhile to admit that these thousands of pieces of paper were a part of those unnecessities.


Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , ,
Categories : Musing

The secret to a long life is knowing when it’s time to go

5 09 2010

A friend is moving away.

Not for awhile—not for a year—but she is leaving.

I’ve got to get out of this city, she says, even as she asks, How can I leave?

Already, she’s missing it.

Already, I’m missing her.

I guess I can hope that she’ll change her mind, but her announcement isn’t a surprise, not really, and because it’s not a surprise—because what’s driving her away from the city have been there for almost as long as I’ve known her—I don’t think she’ll change her mind. It’s not a matter of saying These things you think are bad aren’t really that bad at all, not when these things are bad and not when, in the end, the bad things aren’t  the issue.

No, the city no longer works for her; she can’t live her life here. And so she must go.

I understand the impulse: it’s been pulsing in me since I was a teenager, driving me ever onward. I loved Madison, but never considered staying; it was my college town, and, defined as such, a transitional place. Similarly, Minneapolis and grad school. Albuquerque was a hideaway and I knew even as I didn’t know that the moment I landed I would depart. Montreal—so easy to love, and I did—but my postdoc was for two years, so there was no question that I was just passing through.

Somerville? Oh, no.

And New York? New York was always the holdout city, the one dreamt of as a teenager, the place I could never scrub from my mind even as I avoided moving here. Until I did.

This is the last place; where else could I go?

So I wonder about my friend, and how she can leave. I wonder this even as—still—I wonder where else I could go.

Part of this restlessness is plain unhappiness, dissatisfaction with a life to which I am ill-suited. I don’t think I will ever be rid of this dissatisfaction, that I my life will never suit me. It’s not that I nurture this estrangement, but that I distrust comfort; ergo, satisfaction will always decay into unease.

I have to remember this when I think about leaving. I cannot outrun the thermodynamics of my own existence.

But I also have to remember that even if there are no perfect places, there are better and worse places. For my friend, New York may be better than her (many) previous cities, but that a new city may be better than here. She does not have to be trapped by the grandness of this city.

And I wonder about that. I wonder if I could leave without feeling like a failure.

A year before I left Massachusetts, I visited a friend, in Madison, who grew up in the New York area and lived for many years in the city. She was about to leave for a job in the southwest, and when I told her of my plans to move here, she was wary. New York is a tough town, she said. Unhelpfully, I thought.

I now know what she means (even if it wasn’t what she meant), but at the time I took it as a challenge, as in, You don’t have what it takes to live in New York.

It was humiliating. And devastating, in a small way: How could New York City—my city, my last place—how could it not be for me, or me for it?

So I’ve been here four years, and I can handle it. But just because I’m not handled by it, I wonder, is this my last place? Do I stay to prove a point that does not in any way matter?

Could I do what my friend has done and recognize that this city and her life are not the same, and that the life matters more than the city?

I have to see that, whether I stay or go. I am staying, for now, for however long now lasts, but like my friend, I can’t let this place matter more than my life.


Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: , , , , ,
Categories : Musing

What you say? I’m just askin’ (pt I)

29 08 2010

When do words and acts become being?

As quoted by Tobin Harshaw in The NYTimes’ The Opinionator, Sister Toldjah:

The little secret that is not really a secret except in the closed-minded world of the left is that most conservatives don’t “hate” gay people. Apparently, because most conservatives don’t support gay marriage and don’t support gays openly serving in the military, they “hate” them. This is “hate” – in spite of the fact that most conservatives also do not support polygamy nor any other type of “alternative” marriage, nor do they support women serving on the front lines in war. It’s an issue of not wanting to tamper with the existing social structure of the two parent man/woman family, and not wanting to create an atmosphere of great uncomfortableness in the military between those who are openly gay and those who aren’t. We’ve seen the disastrous results of the left’s tampering in the social arena for decades now, and we’re opposed to signing onto anything else they have to offer on that front.

A commentor, Ralph Dempsey agreed:

I am so sick of being called a ‘homophobe’ just because I oppose gay marriage and want to keep homosexuals out of the military. The liberal Left is trying to play the same game they play with the race card. Sincere, honest, loving, genuine people oppose two men or two women attacking the sanctity of those in heterosexual marriages. That is not bigoted any more than people who opposed interracial marriages were racist. Over 85% of the country during the early 60’s did not want Black men trying to procure white women – were all these people racist? Give me a break. We should be free to oppose minority lifestyles without being labelled as haters.

Hm.

I do like that Mr Dempsey made manifest what is so often implied: Why should the majority suffer any consequences for opposing (oppressing?) minorities?

(And yes, I also like the comparison to views about interracial marriage in the 1960s, when ‘Over 85% of the country did not want Black men trying to procure white women’ didn’t necessarily mean those people were racist. I see. Would you accept sexist?)

As much as I’d like to play around all day with the scary-Negro-carrying-off-white-women image, I do think the more significant issue is the one of doing and being: At what point can your actions—your words, your deeds, your opinions—point to something about you and your character?

Nobody wants to be a bigot, but, it seems, many people wish to speak and act in a bigoted manner.

My first reaction is thus: There are two kinds of tolerance: that of the superior for the inferior, and that of equals for equals. As long as gays and lesbians (and bisexuals! don’t forget us bisexuals!) and anyone else cast in the role of Those People are treated as lesser, then those with the superiority complex may justly be called out for the bigotry of that superiority.

If you seek to deny others what you enjoy yourself, then you may be justly called out for the injustice of that denial.

If you seek to justify this injustice, then you may justly be called a bigot.

You want to be able to speak and act in a bigoted manner, but you don’t want to be called a bigot.

It’s really quite simple: If you don’t want to be called a bigot, then quit acting like one.

****

A fine conclusion (and one which sentiment I’ve almost certainly stolen from others), and certainly a satisfying shortcut through bullshit.

But, alas, in so shortcutting the deeper question is both highlighted and skirted: what are the dots between what you do and who you are?

And what are in those dots, anyway? Stay tuned. . . .


Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Categories : Musing

And when I fall asleep I don’t think I’ll survive the night

27 08 2010

Everyone dies, and everyone was dying.

It was the end of the world, gently. People were falling over and dying, everyone, and everyone knew their own ends were soon, and instead of hysteria and rioting we were going out restaurants and laughing on our barstools and everyone was well-lit (as in the lighting was good but maybe also a little drunk) and in a really good mood.

A bit of melancholy, but mostly a resigned good cheer.

At one point I felt the heaviness in my chest and I crept behind a plywood wall and lay on shaded grass next to a wooden bench and thought Okay, this is it, and the only thing that felt wrong was that I was all alone. We were all dying and it seemed we should die together.

I wasn’t afraid or angry or anything but accepting; it was not a bad feeling.

But then I started to write and I thought, Well, wait a minute, let me try to write before I die, so I got up and was writing on the wall and then on boards and then I thought I need another marker. I got on a bus to take me to a place to get that marker and the bus started careening all over the place and everyone was laughing and I realized that this was a crash bus (it had specific name which I can’t remember) and I had to get off. Not yet, I said, not yet. So when we passed a patch of grass I launched myself off the bus and landed and rolled and when I looked up the people on the bus were laughing and giving me the thumbs up and saying Way to go, Radio.

Radio? I was confused and thought that maybe that had something to do with something I said on the radio. I didn’t know anyone had heard.

Was I afraid to die, was that why I left the bus? I was more worried about the crashing, the injury, than death. Still, I wanted to write.

I ended up in a lab run by the guy who played Michael on LA Law and his young assistant and I said I needed markers and the assistant gave me a small marker which didn’t work and Michael said No, no, she needs a real marker and he gave me a couple and I started writing then and there on whatever wood I could find.

I knew I wouldn’t finish but I thought There has to be a record, someone has to write something down before we’re all gone. Michael and the assistant and the other people in the lab were all working on why we were all dying and they were all smiling, gentle and resigned and still working.

Is this how it is? Wouldn’t there be violence and mayhem and denial and wouldn’t we do anything wreck anything to get away from our end? But no it was like a charmed party nearing its end which we didn’t want to leave but knew the evening had finally come to a close.

So I was back to writing in block letters because it was a thick marker and my penmanship is terrible and I wanted to make sure you could read it and I wondered if other people were writing. I hope other people remembered to write about our end.

And then my chest got heavier and heavier and then I woke up.


Comments : 6 Comments »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : Musing

And I don’t even know their names

22 08 2010

I catch the last car through the grate. Shit.

But it’s not mine, not whisking by the platform, tho’ it’s headed, like me, deeper into Brooklyn. I puzzle over this as I swipe my card and push through the bars to stand and wait.

Hoyt: the train I missed I didn’t, a 4 moseying through on the express track, just not express.

The next 2 train will arrive in. . . 19 minutes. I look up, and the sign says, 2  12 minutes.

Huh? Oh yeah, just cycling through. No 3 train this weekend. Not that I care: the 2 is mine.

I pull out my The Beautiful Struggle and consider leaning against the ceramic pillar while I read, but decide my naked arm is too clean, and I adjust my gym bag and widen my feet instead, hips pushed forward.

Sound down the line, and I peer into the tunnel. The light’s not right: another 4 taking its time rumbling through. I go back to my book, then look up, and see a small girl with her hands cupped around her eyes, spying on Hoyt, spying on me. Her grin is shy, and then, just before she disappears, an even shyer wave.

I watch the people in the rest of the cars. A small boy bouncing in the window, laughing. Two middle-aged men, sitting tight. A woman reading. Another woman reading. A man leaning against the rails, snoozing. The middle conductor glancing at me, his face, blank.

Two more 4 trains amble by while I wait, and I let my book go slack for both of them, staring through the dim of the middle tracks and into the lighted cars. The woman fixing her hair. The young man turned sideways, toward his girl. More books read by more women. A man signing to two people whose backs I can only see. A man in a kipa half-turned, gazing ahead. A young woman in Heidi braids, dozing. The last car, always someone leaning his or her head against whatever will hold it up, dozing. The last car, the conductor’s berth always empty, until the return.

Most of these faces are black, some brown, a few Chinese (do I know they’re Chinese? I do not.). Even fewer are almost as white as me.

I’m still damp from my workout, still damp from my shower, and damp in the long quiet of the station.

The 2 rolls in, the door opens right where I stand. I step through, and head for home.


Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: , , ,
Categories : Musing

Mad world

19 08 2010

I cannot believe (as in: I despair) that this is being considered:

Are there enough curse words in all the world’s languages  to be dropped in response to this?

On a (very small) upside: check out the serious debate on the Atlantic‘s website about Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in particular and the Iran-with-nukes scenario in general. Goldblog irritates me to no end, and in looking at the participants in the debate my first reaction was Elliot Abrams? Seriously?!

Still, there’s a real—as in, serious and reasoned—argument happening there. Wish there were a wider spectrum of views—well, more skeptical and radical views—but then again, I wish I could run 5 1/2 minute miles and that eating Doritos helped me to lose weight.

So just as I puff out oh-so-much-more-than-5 1/2-minute-miles and limit my Doritos consumption, so too do I limit my ambitions as regards mainstream debates about world affairs. That is, I accept that sometimes the less-than-ideal can still be worthwhile.

Now, if only we could get various delusional/sullen world leaders to agree. . . .


Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Categories : Musing, Politics

I’ll jar these mountains till they fall

15 08 2010

‘I am done.’

That was my response to a TNC post on his unwillingness to keep fighting battles he considers settled: I don’t want to die debating the humanity of the blacks, the gays, the browns and the poor.

Amen (or whatever the secular version of that would be), I said in response. I, too, am done defending my status as a human being, done even defending the notion that all of us are humans, and that that’s what, and all, that matters. That I am is settled, done.

But, alas, I am not done. After I said my pie/eace, I realized that there are some issues which are not settled and for which I cannot lay my hammer down.

There are the continued flare-ups, as with the issue of Islam in the US, and whether Muslims get to be as American, much less as human, as the rest of us.

And, of course, there’s abortion. A week or so ago I got sucked into another debate on abortion (also on TNC’s blog); against all better judgment, I couldn’t let the argument that abortion is an immoral and fundamentally selfish act.

Now, those making this argument stipulated that they believe abortion should remain legal, so I should have been able to let it be, right? After all, I do believe abortion is morally fraught, which means I ought to allow for those who agree with me on the legality of abortion to think whatever they want about women who do terminate their pregnancies.

But I couldn’t, because it seemed to me that even in their agreement on the law they diminished the status of those who would make use of the law. How dare a woman choose her life over that of the fetus? they argued. How dare she be so selfish?

How dare she choose herself.

So, yes, I am glad that these critics offer support, however tepid, for the legal right of a woman to make decisions about continuing or ending her pregnancy.

Too bad that support is not so much for the woman herself.

I am tired of this fight, too, am tired of defending a woman’s being, as a human being, and were it just pundits and blog commenters sneering about the decisions a woman may make, I might be able to walk away.

But as long as those with the power to threaten a woman’s ability to live as free human being continue to do so, I’ll keep my hammer handy.


Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: , , , , ,
Categories : Musing

« Previous Entries Next Entries »