Hi..... *smallvoice

So yeah, it's been a minute. And before that post, just about a year ago, writing was sporadic.

Not out of a lack of things to say. Not because the voices are quiet. Not because I've stopped noting things around me. Mostly because life has sped up. And probably because I'm mostly happy.

Fat and happy. I now weigh more than I ever did pregnant. At first this caused me great grief. I didn't like the way I looked, but mostly didn't like the way I felt. But then I realized clothes makes the (wo)man and I didn't have the money to dress for my new size.

I've been working a few days a week at a large charity organization. I like the money. It's not a lot of money but it's steady and it's more than I had... and with the occasional "other" gig or the sale of a photograph, I can at least go shopping again.

So I don't mind so much the curves. Not too fond of the belly, and I still don't like how I feel, so I joined a gym. I like being physical. I was really devastated when my karate family moved so far north and I haven't done anything physical since then. The gym can be boring, but I like the movement. And the little bit of work I've put in has already shed bloat and water weight, and diminished the belly a bit. And the new clothes are awesome. I look forward to losing some pounds because it's an excuse to buy more clothes.

A few random realizations have come out of being bigger, and working a few days a week. Firstly, working for someone else a few days a week has mostly contributed to my being bigger cuz there's not a lot of movement, and I eat to stay awake. Secondly, people sure do waste a lot of time on a job. I so much prefer working from home. I work at a weird, attention-defecit-addled pace, but I gets things done. At work, not so much. By the time I get my flow on, it's 5PM. So I end up staying till 7 so I can get things done.  Getting my own work done at home, or writing hasn't happened much cuz once I am home, it's the dinner hour, then the cleanup-hour, then the fight-with-the-child-to-come-out-of-the-bathroom hour, then I'm too braindead to do much of anything except waste time on Facebook.

Hey speaking of that child: He looks like this, rather than the cute fuzzy-haired dumpling face of a few years ago. He has a girlfriend, he wears a promise ring, he plays football. We've entered the rather interesting world of college recruiting for football, yes already. It's a process. There's a lot of money in it.

BigMan is still here; still tolerant of me. Still loves me. And my kid. He's truly my best friend. And I love him. Simply, and wholly.

So there's stuff to write about. There's racism and family and "isms" and fighting genderisms, God, people, nature, musings, thoughts... I hope I have the time. Once again I get the feeling that there is to be a major change in my life, and I'm trying to prepare myself for it... but I also realize that all the preparing isn't going to make it any easier. There is nothing to do but live.

I need to make the time to write something every day...

A Perfect Example

...of why I hate Black History Month.




A phone kiosk ad for a Dutch Beer, lingering into March.

posted from Bloggeroid

A Great Woman Was Laid to Rest Today...

...and I'm pretty sure that no one was thinking about "International Woman's Day". I certainly wasn't. I don't think her daughters or her son, were either... but if ever a woman embodied what "International Woman's Day" is supposed to be about, I'm pretty sure Iris was it.

I make a policy of not writing other people's stories without permission, and I try to only ever write facts as I know them to be true. And when I do write about my friends and family, I always use a pseudonym so that I can give them a little bit of anonymity. I say all this, because while I knew this woman as Iris, it wasn't actually her name and most people didn't call her that. I'm not even sure how the name came to be, and I hope that her family will forgive me using this name for her... but one of the reasons I'd like to write about her under the name of Iris was because my own grandmother had a Spanish "flower" name, Narcissa... which  means "Daffodil".

Iris died Monday morning. She was 85. I met her because she is the mother of one my best friends in the world, my sister from another mother. In previous posts I've written about my friend under the name of "Shoefly" because she has a penchant for fly shoes.

I met Shoefly right after I moved to the Rock. I worked at a cable TV station, and Shoefly was hired in to the payroll department, and since I was some kind of "manager" of the Helpdesk there, they brought her around to meet me. We hit it off right away and we bonded fast once we realized we lived on the same little Rock.

My other best friend, otherwise known as CrazyWoman, had just left the cable TV station for a position at another station, and was actually the reason I moved to the Rock. Devastated by my breakup with the AllAmericanJerseyBoy, I needed a place to live--fast. I had gotten used to the quiet of New Jersey, but wanted to live in the Bronx close to my sister and her new baby. CrazyWoman introduced me to the Rock, and for a long while I thought I'd never leave. At that time, we were all single (though ShoeFly was planning a wedding) and all about the same color brown, so I got Shoefly together with CrazyWoman on the Rock, and we became inseparable.

For a while, CrazyWoman lived towards the end of the Rock, but Shoefly moved right around the corner from me thanks to a fourth best friend who's mom had an apartment to rent; my bedroom window overlooked their back yard. And then CrazyWoman, who had a young daughter, moved across the street from Shoefly. For a time we four hung tough, but Shoefly got married and suddenly decided to have a baby, and then during her little one's first year of life, I got myself knocked up with the Sun. So that took the three of us off the hang-out circuit... and we spent more and more time in each other's company, rotating kids, cooking duties, co-opping K-mart runs, organizing zoo trips or keeping each other company in the laundromat. We used to joke that ShoeFly's very patient husband actually had three wives... with all of the duties but none of the benefits. We did beach days, pool days, birthdays... CrazyWoman's daughter was older than ShoeFly's Moon and my Sun but about the same age as ShoeFly's stepdaughter. So we were always together in some configuration.

ShoeFly and I had another thing in common, other than the Sun and the Moon.... strong mothers with gigantic personalities, and sisters. CrazyWoman did too, but her circumstances were a little different. But from the moment I met Shoefly, I heard about "mommy" and BigSister. BigSister was the doppelganger to my little sister the Professor, which made me fall in love with her immediately. And like my sister, BigSister could cook her ass off, and it was from her I learned how to make sofrito, recaito, Spanish style roasted chicken, and beans and rice. Oh, and turkey wings. And almost from the beginning, when we would rustle up the kids and go to the BearMountain pool or the zoo, BigSister had to "go get mommy" in very much the same way my own sister always has to go "get mama".

I liked Iris immediately. As the years went on, I heard all sorts of stories about her, and I won't repeat them because they are not mine to tell, but I came to have an enormous amount of admiration for this imperfect and independent woman, who was devoted to her God and to her children. She was certainly a nontraditional mom,  but the more I came to know her, and the longer I knew her and her children one thing stood out about her; she loved her kids. All of them. They were all grown, and had lives, and while sometimes their lives were disorganized or chaotic, not only did they look out for mommy, they looked out for each other.

And Iris was always the boss. BigSister was second-in-command, but Iris was the boss... and through the years, even after her kids turned 40, or 50, they could still be the doghouse with mommy. Some of my greatest giggles were at the expense of one of them getting into the doghouse. I'd call up Shoefly, or mostly she'd call me..."Girly I have gossip!!!!" and then proceed to tell me something one of her siblings did... and the punchline was always "so who's going to tell mommy?" Or "does mommy know?" And even better... "What did mommy say?"

Iris had a stroke a while back... it was terrible to see her kids rocked. And for a time she insisted on continuing to live on her own, but that was getting increasingly harder to do, and so she put herself into an assisted living facility.

It happened to be a nice one, as these places go, though not as nice as the Hebrew home in New Rochelle. But certainly a billion times nicer than the one they put Poppy in after he lost his leg. But what made this particular assisted living place resonate with life, was Iris. She ended up in a corner room, all by herself, and proceeded to fill it with plants, snacks and a collection of black and white cows. And I never hesitated to "go see mommy" when either ShoeFly or BigSister had to go take her food, or snacks, or just to say hi. Sometimes we would go because she didn't feel too well, but she was never feeble or whiny. If anything, she was demanding, but never in an imperious way... it was just she expected her kids to provide her with something, mostly because she didn't generally ask for much.

Pretty much from the beginning of my knowing this family, I spent Christmas eve with them. I don't know how it started... I don't remember the first one... but I do know that once I spent it with them, I could never spend it anywhere else. When the kids were little, we'd start congregating about 7P or so, and from then till midnight, the rest of the family would come in, and BigSister would have cooked some amazing dinner. And always, no matter who came or didn't come, there was always Iris. After her first stroke, when she became confined to a wheelchair, she would settle in her corner, and hold court. You came in to the house, you kissed mommy, and then you went to grab your plate and eat before everyone else came. And you would torture the kids with unopened presents. BigBrother has two girls, BigSister a son, and the LittlestPrincessSister, she has a boy and a girl. And then the Moon and the Sun... so for a while there were plenty of presents to torture the kids with. They could not be touched until the stroke of midnight. And then BigSister would stand there with a big plastic garbage bag, the presents would be passed around and ripped into, and the wrapping swept immediately into the garbage bag. In less than 20 minutes it was over. And then it was time to fight for leftovers to take home. Well, I'd fight for leftovers to take home.

By the way, yes, I'm Jewish. And no, I don't keep Christmas. But I certainly kept Christmas eve, mostly because the love that would fill that house was enough to keep you going at least half the year.

The last year or so, Iris's mini-strokes got closer together. For the most part she kept going, and at any family gathering she was there. And the only real indication that anything was wrong--at least the face that she showed the world--was that she was quieter.

Its funny... I love pictures, and I take a lot of pictures. But usually on Christmas eve I would bring my camera, and end up taking very few pictures. In life, I usually take pictures because I'm an observer. I love watching people. But these people... this family... is one of the few where I'm completely comfortable being less observing and more participatory. So I'd be too busy to take pictures... or good ones, anyway. And later, I noticed my reluctance to take Iris's picture. She was so strong that her suffering was private. I would train my camera on her, and feel guilty invading her space with a picture of her immobility, and I couldn't take the picture. It wasn't ever that she made me feel uncomfortable.... and it wasn't the same as her family taking her picture, but I never wanted to expose her somehow.

So, Monday morning I got a text (I had to work) that Iris was making her transition. And in less than two hours, the transition was complete.

Wednesday was the wake. Many people came to show Iris and her family their love. I brought the Sun along, because as he said "she was always nice to me"... she never treated him differently from her own  grandkids, signing her cards to him "Grandma".

It was so sad to be there, to see her grown children hold each other and cry for her. But at the same time, it was clear that this woman's remarkable legacy was in the bond that her kids had for each other. It reminded me of a question posed to me once by a teacher at Pratt...."When you die, and you meet Saint Peter at the gate, what is the one thing you hope he says that to you?" I was the only parent in that class, and the professor turned to me and said "I bet it's that you'd like him to tell you you were a good mom?" I thought for a minute an decided, no, that's not would I want to hear... what I would want to hear is that "You Sun is a good man". Because that would mean I had done my job.

Iris had been a single parent. And according to her kids, sometimes a little unconventional. But  each of her kids has turned out to be good people. And her grandkids are at various stages of being good people. And while her passing is sad, and it will be hard to not hear her laugh, or hear her very funny commentaries on people, her passing allows her children to come into their own, to be the remarkable people they are.

The realization reminded me of this quote from Battlestar Galactica*:

In our civil war, we've seen death. We've watched our people die. Gone forever. As terrible as it was beyond the reach of the Resurrection ships, something began to change. We could feel a sense of time, as if each moment held its own significance. We began to realize that for our existence to hold any value, it must end. To live meaningful lives, we must die and not return. The one human flaw that you spend your lifetimes distressing over... Mortality is the one thing... Well, it's the one thing that makes you whole.

Death is sad, and final... but it is our greatest asset because it's what makes us what we are. As human beings we have the consciousness to know that every day we are marching very slowly to our inevitable end. It cannot be avoided, or changed. We will die. Hopefully after living a long and fulfilling life like Iris's, but we will die. In the meantime, we have the choice, the will, to make every day count towards something.

And... since this was International Women's Day (which I had forgotten about until a friend reminded me, rather pointedly), we as women have another contribution; our children. Not every woman is a parent, and certainly, not every woman should be a mother. And no, we should not define our entire existence through our children... our children are only a part of who we are, and we should never be defined by any one part.

But that being said... for those women who have chosen to be parents, it's one of the hardest, scariest and most rewarding things we can do. As BigSister said... we are handed a tiny, slippery, squawling bundle of humanity and that is all. It doesn't come with an instruction manual (no matter how many books on childrearing there are, there is no definitive handbook), or even any clothes. Everything from that point forward, we are responsible for providing. And we are responsible for shaping that life, and for guarding that flame. And sometimes we get it right and hit a "sweet spot", and sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we fail miserably. At best, we can hope that our children only need a minimum of therapy, and at worst, we hope our heart can survive the stress our children will give us.

And at the end of our days, when we make our transition, we can only hope that our children will stand together and love and console each other, and be the amazing people we have hoped they would be.

And then we can consider ourselves as blessed as Iris....

March 8, 2012

*if you're unfamiliar with BSG, the short story is, a race of robotic humans has destroyed the planet humans lived on, and most of the human race. There are 12 "Cylon models", and each model all looks the same, and share the same traits and memories. They die, but when they do they are "downloaded" onto a Resurrection ship, where their memories and personalities are transferred into another body, exactly like the one they had before. So it seems they never die... but at some point, in their quest to be more human, they decide to destroy their Resurrection technology...

An Open Letter To My Poppy on the Occasion of my Sun's 13th Birthday...

My dearest Poppy,

I wanted to write you a letter to tell you some things, and I wanted to write it while you're still here to appreciate it. I didn't want this to be the kind of letter that would be read in the "kind words" section at your Remembrance. And, you're going to be famous again one day, and then all kinds of stories about you will circulate and someone might write The UnAuthorized Biography of the Poppy, and put in all kinds of crazy "tell-alls"... and any time the Professor or I say "Yeah, but it wasn't exactly like that" folks will only think we're in denial.

But it was important for me to say this to you on the occasion of my Sun's 13th birthday. In some cultures, this makes him a young man... and he is, but really right now he's just entering his teens, still a baby with a long way to go, but 13 is a pretty big step.

You were the first family member I told, once I knew officially that the Sun was on his way, and once I had decided I was going to be a mom. I told you first, because I knew you'd be OK with it (even though I wasn't married) and I knew that if YOU were OK with it, any objections anyone else had wouldn't be all that overwhelming, because nobody really argues with Poppy when he's decided on a thing.

But then when I was seven months pregnant, the Professor called me up one morning and told me they had taken you to the hospital, and that it was serious. And it got even more serious as the days wore on and they discovered the tumor in your bladder and your failing kidneys. I was really scared... beyond scared, even. In that place where I just go numb and back out of feeling. I told the Professor she was now the older sister, because I just couldn't carry the weight right then. You know now how difficult my relationship with the Sun's dad was, but back then nobody really knew. Only the people who lived in the same building as me, or the few friends we had in common knew the extent of it. To them, our fights were legendary.... loud, stressful, mean. So the thought of you not being there was a bit more than I could handle.

I remember asking you to fight, to hold on. I told you I really needed you... and the little boy I was growing was going to need you, because at the time I wasn't really sure how it was all going to work out with his dad. You gave every indication that you weren't ready to go anyhow, but the doctors weren't always so sure.

So first off... thank you for sticking around. Later on I know it got a little bit harder and very very painful, and every time they rushed you to the ER I would offer up a silent prayer to the True God that I would let you go if I had to, if you wanted to go I would accept it but please I'm still not grown yet, I'm not ready yet, please let him stay a little while longer... and I am very grateful that you get to see my boy become a man.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time with you. I spent a lot of time with BigBear, too, and I thank her for being an amazing mother, super patient wife and strong woman, and for setting by example the kind of woman I wanted to be... but you and I, we've always had an understanding. You always have the uncanny ability to know exactly what I'm feeling, and will say something to me or ask me a question right at that moment, and cut right to the heart of me. I admit, there have been times when I denied whatever it was you said... but I would smile to myself and later on, when no one was looking allow myself to experience whatever it was I was feeling, and to be OK about it, because Poppy said so.

No one has ever been able to make me feel bad about something the way you could.... and I mean that in a good way. Like, once when I was about 12, you caught me in a lie, and even though I denied it, you knew and I knew you caught me and I was crushed. I could fight BigBear and be recalcitrant and defiant all day long, but you... all you had to do was wriggle your eyebrows at me and I would be reduced to tears. But no one else has ever been able to break me, though several people tried. And damn near succeeded, I admit, but in the end I remain unbroken. Your "eleventh commandment: Neither a doormat nor punching bag shall ye be" gave me permission to take on the world and win without apology.

When the Sun came, it was because of you and BigBear that I was able to walk away from a $90,000 a year gig, because I didn't like what I was becoming, and because I wanted to see my baby boy grow up. Nobody else really understood. But all those walks we took together in Paris; me on your shoulders or riding my red tricycle, and all those times you stopped typing your story to put a radish on a toothpick for me and call it a lollipop, and all those days you said I didn't have to go to school because it stressed me, and all those nights you sat up with me while I struggled to breathe.... all those things gave me permission to do that for my boy. I wasn't always sure his dad was going to be there... and in truth there were times he wasn't, but I knew I was going to be there, no matter what it took.

I remember the nature walks we took in Bull Bay in Jamaica, looking for the hidden and not so hidden wonders of our life... speckled eggs in a sandy nest, washed up shells, the pelicans and there food pouches, how the beach would completely erode after a hurricane, or learning to time the waves so we wouldn't get wet as we passed that rocky wall up near 10 Mile... all those things I remembered when it was time to see the world through my Sun's eyes, to enjoy those little things and triumphs all over again. I was even able to have him grow up next to a beach, the way I did, and with joy I showed him all those things I had seen as a child.

When we had to leave Jamaica, I remember feeling your pain, remember us sitting on the beach and you crying because you hoped we didn't all lose our souls in America. At the time, I had a concept of "the soul" because of all the animals we had seen pass on, and because of all the Old Testament we had read, but it wasn't until the Sun came along, and I had to work at a job I hated and felt that my soul was dying, that I really understood what you meant. I sat in my armchair once, with Boy nursing at my breast and me talking to Uncle C on the phone about creating, crying because I didn't have the time for Boy let alone for creating, and it was like dying. So the morning I woke up and Boss pissed me off one last time and I walked out on that job and that life and never looked back, I could do it because after all, taking that kind of risk on my happiness was more familiar to me than allowing my soul to die in an office cubicle.

Because I had a father I loved and who was there for me, I had the strength to accomplish the extremely difficult task of fighting a man who was trying to break me, yet still allow him to be a father to his son.  I knew both the father and the son needed each other, needed to be in each other's lives, because I always had you in mine. And to say that this was not an easy task is an understatement. You were always kind to him... always patient and hopeful for him, the Sun's dad. And for the most part, he's an awesome Dad. We don't always see eye-to-eye, and sometimes we still want to strangle each other, and we will NEVER be a couple, because someone would die (and not me), but he has turned out to be a pretty cool dad. Although one of the past incidents that still pisses me off is him yelling at you in court... but at the same time, I realize he never had what I had... never even had the freedom to say what he felt to his own dad, so I can actually forgive him that. But it still ticks me off.... because of everyone watching the drama from the outside, you cut him the most slack.

Because you were patient with us, because you taught us to say "NO!" and mean it, because you respected when we said "NO!" and meant it, because you listened to what we had to say, because you gave us the power to make choices and accept the consequences of those choices, when my Sun came along I found myself listening more, giving him the opportunity to make choices for himself, and to accept consequences. This is something the Sun's father and I don't always agree on... but because you let us live our lives by the choices we made, accepting the mistakes we made because of a bad choice and not berating us too much (and there was no need.. after all the mistakes themselves were far better punishment for a bad choice than anything you could have done) even though it sometimes pains me to see my kid make a mistake, I know I can let him.

Because of you, because you told us the story of Nana Jessie over and over and over again, and because I grew up to find her story in census and historical data, I was encouraged to start finding out about BigBear's family. It might have taken me that much longer to be curious if I hadn't already known that Nana Jessie was the unknown and direct descendant of Francis S. Bartow, Colonel of the Confederate Army. That fact alone taught me to not to accept history just because it was written; nowhere was Col. Bartow's illegitimate slave daughter ever acknowledged. But Nana Jessie's facts were provable... and so I learned a very important lesson: ask your own questions. Don't just accept what you are told. I once had a job where the computer system that was in place made absolutely no sense... the main computers were in Washington, D.C, and the "slave terminals" (ironic description) in New York could not save any data locally but were forced to save back in DC. And the network often failed, so that we would frequently have to wait until the systems came back online, or recreate what was lost. The computer manager got annoyed by my constant questioning and asked me one day "Must you ALWAYS question me? Will you ever just accept what you are told?" I said no. And I left that stupid place in less than five months.

There's only one thing I disagree with you on.... you should have made me learn the guitar. I know I fought you tooth and nail to even look at one, and learned some piano and sang a lot in defiance, but you were right.... I should have learned to play, to at least expose myself to another way of thinking musically. And this is why I battle my kid twice a week for violin, and now I'm battling him to learn guitar, because I want him to know there's more than one way to say something with music. He'll probably hate the violin the rest of his life... and will stop playing the minute I'm too tired to fight him.... but he can read music WAY better than I ever could, and he can actually play the thing.

Actually, there's two other things where you were wrong... the first and most important is that I was NEVER going to be like Aunt Sinah. I had too much of BigBear's Indian Blood to be sucked into thinking that science and math and being smart was what I was... I was good at those things but only because I could actually feel them... I got the right answers in math because I could follow the train of thought in my heart, but I never could prove it on paper, nor did I even want to. I loved biology because nature and the Higher Power's creations fascinate me, not because I had a particularly scientific mind. And I always knew I would have a child, I always knew I 'd be a parent... it was drilled into me by BigBear. "When you grow up and have children..."BigBear would always say, and I would always listen to what ever she said after that... that I would need to make a shopping list or cook a meal  for four with five dollars, or whatever. I know that part of your joy at my announcement of the Sun was because you were more than a little afraid he would never come... but I always knew he would. In fact, I held off from conceiving him from the time I was 18, only because there were things I wanted to see and do before he came...

And the last thing I disagree with you on is "doing right because it's right to do right". I remember you saying that humans ONLY do right because they fear the consequences that doing wrong will bring them... but I have learned and seen some evil people in the world, who relish the pain of doing wrong. They thrive on it. So that fear never prevents them from doing wrong, and worse... because they aren't afraid of not doing right, sometimes it even seems they don't suffer at all! There were times, for instance, when I could plot out really awful things for people who had crossed me, and I knew I'd be able to get away with it too... but in the end I didn't ONLY because it was the right thing to do. Sometimes, you do right because it's right to do right...

But other than that... because of you Poppy, I am the woman I am. Yes, I have the greatest sister in the world, and the greatest mom ever... but you gave me freedom from fear. I am not afraid to be strong, I am not afraid to be brown, I am not afraid to be right, I'm not even afraid to be wrong. I'm not afraid to ask questions, or question answers. I'm not afraid to stand up for myself. I'm not afraid to fight tooth and nail, even to kill (God forbid) in defense of my baby, my family, my love. I am not afraid to be kind or gentle. Because, you, my Poppy never made me afraid of anything. OK, I'm no fan of failure... and I've had some pretty spectacular failures, but I'm not afraid to try again or something new just because I failed. But most importantly, I was never afraid to be a mother, even if it meant being a single mother, because I knew you had my back. And because my Sun grew up knowing his mother wasn't afraid, he's very secure... and he's going to be a great man some day. Though sometimes I have to remind him a little bit of fear is a good thing.... and I do remember you always quoting "The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom..." and I'm reminding myself I need to tell him that more often....

Poppy I'm so happy you're here to see him turn 13. And I look forward to you seeing him graduate from high school, from college. And maybe even you'll get to meet his wife... but I am very very happy that today, this day, I can say thank you Poppy, I love  you. Look at my Sun! He's taller than me now, can you believe it? He looks like his daddy but he looks like us too, isn't that funny? Nana Jessie would like him, and Nana Narcissa too, and he would make Grandpa Wil smile. And great-grandpa Narcisso. I told the Sun the other day about Narcisso in the Irish bar... he thought that funny. I told him we come from a long line of defiant people, so use that to defy evil, to stand up for justice.... and he liked that, too.

Happy 13th Sun Day, Poppy.

I love you.

Yup, I'll Say It Again...

...in case you missed it the last four years... I still hate Black History Month. You can follow the link to read a post I wrote four years ago, if you care to.

A lot has changed since I wrote that post, both in America and in my life. America did elect her first brownskinned President in 232 years, and he is now up for re-election. I found out even more about my own personal American history. And instead of living in a mostly-"white" community, I now live in a browner community, which has only reinforced my dislike of "Black" History Month.

What hasn't changed is racism. I can't say that it's gotten worse than it ever was. When you look at the last 236 years of American History, brown, tan, or reddish-toned folk have universally been targeted for a disproportionate amount of ill-treatment and genocide ever since European settlers made their homes on this continent. Right after the Civil War, and then again one hundred years later after the Civil Rights movement,  brown people made great advances in the way we were perceived. But invariably, those strides forward brought on a backlash that sent our rights two steps in the opposite direction: the strides we made after during Reconstruction beget the KKK and Jim Crow Laws, for example. After Obama's election, racism has certainly become less hidden though I have to say the backlash, while expected, makes my head spin. Having a brown President has brought out every snide, nasty comment we ever had about "race", and allowed it to be aired in the guise of bipartisan politics. And everyone is guilty.

I still think--no, I'm even more convinced that singling out an ethnic history does an enormous disservice to this country and everyone in it. It perpetuates the myth of race. It doesn't take into account the real reasons that "race" came into existence in the first place. And, it hides the real truth, which is that brown peoples all over the western hemisphere have been systematically and purposely divided, dominated and destroyed in order for a Euro-centric empire to flourish. And, it sets up the greatest myth of all, that America is "white and black".

As an American who is brown-skinned, I will not identify as "Black". I am not black in color. I do not, nor do any of ancestors or family members come from a country named "Black". To talk of a "Black Experience" conjures up images of a people as seen through European eyes.For me, quite literally, drawn and colored black or photographed in shades of black white and grey.

I will not, cannot identify as "African American". I am not African, any more or less than I am European. Neither my father, nor mother, nor any of my grand or great-grands or even most of my great-great grands were born in Africa. I know this, because I took the time over several years to find out exactly who my people were. I have found two Africans in my tree; one from Madagascar and one from some heretofore unidentified African country. Neither of them, interestingly enough, were brought over as slaves. And with the exception of Nicolas Marin from Alsace-Lorraine and Narcisso Garcia from Puerto Rico, the remainder of my known ancestry were born and bred in America. On my mother's side of the tree, a surprising number of my ancestors were born outside of slavery, or weren't slaves for long.

I don't think my family's history is all that unique for brownskinned people from the East Coast of America, although I notice that the further south and more inland you go, the mixture between European, Native and African may be more weighted one way or the other. But there are a great many of us who claim varying amounts Native Blood.

People will argue for the cause of the "Black Experience", or the "African American" experience. It largely brings to mind slaves and the horrors of slavery, of emancipation, of segregation and Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ways in which a people have triumphed over obstacles. In no way am I negating any of that history. But my soul hurts for the stories that are NOT told, or forgotten and then completely obliterated and left out from the accepted narrative.

And I still get really angry by the suggestion that because I insist on claiming ALL of my ancestors, I'm really trying to avoid being "Black" or "African American". I can assure you that this is not the reason. Nor do I think there's some "money for Indian Scholarships" and I don't feel a need to research my history so that I can "enroll" in a tribe. While I am inordinately proud of my African heritage and the triumphs of my African ancestors, I resent being made to feel as if I must identify one way or the other.

This year already, more than years past I have seen homage paid to Carter G. Woodson as the "father" of African American History, and to W.E.B. DuBois as being a leading great educated "Black" man. I most certainly am not devaluing their work; without Woodson's insistence our African history may have been erased completely, because Euro colonists didn't really want for their slaves to know where they came from. They didn't teach their slaves to read and write for a multitude of reason, history being one of them.  But I personally have inherited some feelings about DuBois in particular, who was a little bit of an elitist... at least to hear my grandfather tell it.

DuBois was a frequent guest at my great-grandparents home in Atlanta and his snobbery apparently pissed off my great-grandmother who was more than a little Native (most likely Nottoway). I think it amused and sort of rubbed my great-grandfather the wrong way, he being at least an 8th or more of Seminole via his mother. While there was a huge catch-all called "mulatto" on the censuses of that time, amongst that group itself,  there was a distinction between "mulatto" (African and European) and "half-breed" (Native and African).The mulattoes held disdain for "half-breeds"....  DuBois and Woodson were, according to research, "mulatto". My great-great grandmother Annie Cox was "half-breed".

But the kicker is that while mulattoes or "creoles" might have been relegated to being the courtesans of Europeans, they were left alone to hold property and houses. "Halfbreeds", if they identified as "Native" (which would be likely if the mother was Native and the father black) could still be hustled off their property and sent to Oklahoma via the Trail of Tears. So I suspect that a great many of my "halfbreed" ancestors who had land and were free long before slavery ended, allowed themselves  to be thought of as "mulatto" which eventually and arbitrarily became "light skinned black". Think about... if you owned property, and could lose it by claiming your full heritage, what would you do??

In reality, all it has ever been about, this "race" thing, is money. And business. BIG business. Multinational corporations worth billions of dollars.

In the 1300s, European countries could trade, import and profit from silk, spices and opiates from Asia because of deals they had made with Mongolia and China. But when the Roman Empire fell, and the Turks blocked the trade routes, Europeans sought other routes. Some Europeans, particularly the Dutch and Portuguese explored eastwards, convinced they could get around Africa to Asia. Some explored West, convinced they could cross the ocean and get to Asia from the other side. Columbus, Italian by birth and Spanish by way of his young mistress/second wife, got financing from Spain and took the latter route. He happened on the Caribbean and the Americas, and the rest is established as history. Initially, the upper class of the Europeans exported and abused their own to work in new colonies--the poor, the broke, the criminal-- and to develop these new lands. But it wasn't enough of a labor pool and business wasn't making enough of a profit. The companies weren't able to top the profits of the spices, opiates and silk they had made with Asian trade.

Africans and the Moors were already known to Europeans, but my own personal theory is that war, particularly with the Moors (around the time Columbus sailed for the West) helped to promote the feeling of "us versus them" that allowed Europeans to justify African slavery. Besides, the Moors were not Christian.

In America, the first people abused and enslaved to work for the colonies were the Indigenous people here, but that proved difficult. Yes, many Native Americans died because of European diseases they were not used to, and they died because the Europeans laid waste to the the land and food sources the Native population relied on. But many many many more of the Native peoples retreated further into America, refusing to serve Europeans, forming alliances with each other and disappearing from view. America was their home, after all, her forests and swamps and mountains easy for them to retreat to.

To "break" them, the Europeans captured and exported whole nations of indigenous people to the Caribbean, and replaced them with people from Africa. As far as conquering a people goes, it was a brilliant strategy; it disoriented the people exported, it reduced the numbers of the people left, and it completely subjugated the people imported. How can you fight a battle when you don't know where you are, or how you'll get back home?

But there was something the Europeans didn't quite count on when they first got to this part of the world: unity between the newly imported Africans and the Natives. When the Africans ran away they were often taken in and adopted by Native Americans. The Seminole Nation in the swamps of Georgia and Florida were most famous for defending their African friends. And amongst the colonies in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, so many Africans intermarried with Native peoples that at one point, "free blacks" out numbered the white colonists.

Slave revolts in the West Indies frightened the American colonists, and they resolved to not let that happen here. And while history traditionally told you that the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean were "wiped out", new, more accurate knowledge has proven this a lie. The infamous Maroons of Jamaica, who terrorized English colonists, were a mixture of the Native Arawaks of Jamaica and runaway African slaves. Recently, DNA testing begun in 1999 found that up to 62% of present day Puerto Ricans are of Amerindian descent.

In America, they began to enact laws that prohibited mixed unions, and reclaimed many African/Natives as "free blacks". In time, they even legalize the capture and re-enslavement of "free blacks". To further widen the divide between Native peoples and African slaves, Europeans introduced and actively encouraged the concept of slavery to Native Nations, particularly the Five Civilized Tribes. Some Nations, particularly the Cherokee, took to slavery in a more Euro-centric way, especially among those Cherokee who themselves were  partially European. Initially, the major difference between Euro slavery and Native slavery was racism; "White" Euros dehumanized brown skinned people in order to justify perpetual servitude. But for many nations, a "slave" was the equivalent of a less-fortunate relative whose care and feeding were repaid with service.. and often slaves were absorbed into the family either by marriage or age. This rarely--if ever-happened among Europeans in this country.

Its important to realize how much money was generated by slavery; how many companies were built on its practice, how many industries and products were made and were exported cheaply due to slavery, how many banks were formed to deal with the money. Wall Street came into existence because of slavery and racism. And then perhaps you will understand why it was so important to keep slavery going. Really, slavery still is going. Currently everyone is talking about Apple and its use of Chinese slave labor... but think about the billions of dollars made on Apple products because it can pay its workers peanuts and force them to work long shifts, housing them in dormitories where they can easily be called into service. These days its electronics; in early America it was cotton, clothing, and tobacco. In the West Indies it was sugar. But slavery has existed since mankind started fighting wars. What was new to the institution was racism; declaring that a person might be a slave in perpetuity, because of the color of his skin. That because she was darker, she was less intelligent, less human. God-ordained to be dominated.

Even when slavery ended, racism had become so ingrained in the country that many people stayed right where they were, continuing to work in the same conditions they toiled under during slavery. And for the great many who migrated north, the companies that survived and profited from their exploitation still needed cheap labor to survive , and did so by racially exploiting these people, relegating them to second-class citizenship, segregation, and poverty.

For all of us, being told that we should identify as "Black" or "African American" severely limits the very rich and diverse history of this country. It limits our scope to think we are "only" one thing, share "one" experience, and contribute to "our race" and not this entire country. Furthermore, it is a Euro-centric way of thinking that we have been encouraged to accept.

Every year, "great African-Americans" are held up study and praise, ostensibly to create pride in ourselves. But it is inaccurate history; since many of these icons are just as Native American as they are African American. And to ONLY claim the "African" negates the importance of  these people in the larger context of the world. It limits their contribution. I often wonder what greater contributions to humankind my own grandfather (who knew of his African, Native and European history but never spoke of it) would have been capable of had he felt comfortable declaring all of his ancestry. How long would slavery and oppression REALLY last, if Native Americans and ex-African slaves truly united to fight the same oppressor? America might be a very different-looking place.

For instance, Crispus Attucks, known as the first person killed in the name of American freedom, was African and Native Canadian. To only identify him as "Black" limits the story of who he really was, where he came from, why he felt compelled to stand for America as a man. Arthur A. Schomburg, a "Black" librarian, was in fact from Puerto Rico of German and African/St. Croix parents. To only identify him as "Black" limits why his quest to research and collect books about Africa. To talk of the "Black Experience" severely limits the true horror of people forced to choose or hide their cultural identity in order to survive.


Only looking at "Black History" limits the true story of America. It allows everyone else to teach "American" (read "White") history 337 (338 in a leap year) days of the year. And for 28 ( or 29 in a leap year) they can pretend they are honoring "Black" people by reciting every known fact about Black Greatness. And sometimes some little known facts. But our country's history is FAR more complicated and nuanced than just "history" and "Black History".

If I only identified as "African American" I may be ashamed of my "white" ancestors, assuming their unions with my "black" ancestors were born of rape and torture.I would assume that the slaveholder I did find in my history was "White". I may completely overlook the possibility that Peter Morgan, slave holder and probable father of Peter G. Morgan was an Indian slaveholder. And I wouldn't have bothered to delve into the history of Nicolas Marin, who left his European wife and children to live with his mulatto (Euro and African) mistress, raising eight children with her.

And just today, looking up historical facts, I found out something fascinating. It turns out my father's ancestor Marin, born in Barcelona but German-speaking, and who emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine to America in the very early 1870's, was likely to be a Sephardic Jew, or at least of Jewish descent. A fact that amuses me, since my father converted himself and us to Judaism "because it made sense." I might never have learned that if I only looked at history through the eyes of a "Black" woman, rather than an American one...

Which is what I am. An American woman.

Sources:
Arthur A. Schomburg
Wiki on Arawaks
Wiki on the fall of Constantinople
Wiki on The Moors

Petersburg and the Atlantic World
Sephardim
William Loren Katz, author of Black Indians
The Melungeons
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles C. Mann

The Threat of Race, David Theo Goldberg
SOMO-Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations
History of the Jewish Community in Alsace Lorraine

Animal Farm

...had a profound effect on me as a high school freshman.

My parents purposely took me out of the country in '67, after Malcolm X was shot. The intent was to go to Africa, but after spending time in France to learn French we ended up in Jamaica the winter of 68-69. There were many reasons to go to Jamaica rather than Africa, but a major reason we went to a tropical location was because I developed severe asthma. Where other people outgrow their asthma, I never outgrew mine.

I went to school there until I was 7, where I learned how to read, do basic math and some Jamaican history. After awhile, my father figured that the headmaster of the English-styled school was stressing me and it contributed to my attacks.

Without medication, an asthma attack can last a few days, and mine often did. It takes all your energy to breathe when you have asthma, and you can't really eat and breathe at the same time. Your body freaks out at the thought of yet another thing obstructing your airways and shuts down your appetite. I was a really skinny kid as a result.

After awhile,  my dad just took me out of school altogether, and he and my mom began a loose attempt at educating my sister and me. We learned American and European history. We learned to speak "RP", Received Pronunciation, how to read and write phonetic symbols, and how to write a short story.

We read a lot. We had no TV after awhile, and at the time there were only two radio stations in Jamaica... RJR and JBC, so when we weren't digging up nannybugs, making mudpies, playing the "Eric and Johnny Game" or taking care of the cats, we read. We looked forward to Poppy's trips to town... he'd stop by the library and bring us books to read, or he'd buy us some. My favorites were Enid Blyton's "Malory Towers" series, about English girls at boarding school. I tried to make a game out of it, but the idea of being without your family in a boarding school was a really foreign concept to me, so we stuck to "Eric and Johnny"... were the Professor was married to "Eric" and I to "Johnny", and we had children and nursed babies and ran a household and ran an organization that saved widows and orphans and helped peasants. Except for the saving of widows and orphans and the helping of peasants, the "Eric and Johnny Game" was fueled by real life. However, the widows and orphans and peasants aspect was fueled by our weekly readings of the Old Testament during Sabbath Service, and the communist books my Poppy often brought home.

When I had asthma I read a lot, because that was about all I could do. I couldn't sleep... it was uncomfortable laying down and the sound of wheezing in my head made me dream of screaming ladies. I couldn't play with my sister or the cats. Laughing made me cough which sent my lungs into spasm, and talking was too much work. I couldn't eat. So when I wasn't sitting quietly somewhere waiting for breathing to come easier, I read because it took my mind off my thoughts...and my mind raced during asthma because without reading there was nothing else to do.

Aside from Malory Towers, which was just mindcandy, two books I remember best are Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, and Yenan Seeds and Other Stories, "a collection of short stories... (that reflects... ) the Chinese people's new life of struggle since the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution from several angles."

Just for a moment, imagine being twelve years old, trapped in your own mind and reading things like:

The ruthless economic exploitation and political oppression of the peasants by the landlord class forced them into numerous uprisings against its rule.... It was the class struggles of the peasants, the peasant uprisings and peasant wars that constituted the real motive force of historical development in Chinese feudal society. 

 And...

Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism - the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big Landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right-wing may become our enemy and their left-wing may become our friend - but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks.

Stuff like that has a profound effect on a twelve year old.

So then, because we were strangers in a strange land and we owed money to the landlord and he called immigration, we got deported from Jamaica, and I no longer had the luxury of endless reading, playing with cats and digging up nannybugs. I decided I wanted to go to school. Poppy was willing to keep us home and hidden, but I insisted.

I did well in 7th and 8th grade. Academically, I mean. Socially not so much... I was skinny and didn't wear flare legs or colored overalls and Pro-Keds,  my unpressed hair didn't stay in curls for more than an hour and I knew too much. Teachers loved me, kids teased me. Especially light-skinned wavy-haired Kay, who I realized later had a host of problems that had nothing to do with me. She lived in the rundown tenement across the street from I.S. 201 with her mother and several brothers and sisters. Her mother was a large, surprisingly dark woman. One day I got a glimpse of her dad... a white man who wore black rimmed glasses and came to visit sometime but didn't live there. She picked on me to deflect attention from her poverty and her bi-racialness. Back then, "white in Harlem" was DECIDEDLY uncool.

In 8th grade I had band, and started to play the saxophone. The breathing exercises I practiced to calm my asthma made my lungs pretty strong when they weren't spasming, and I was pretty good at sax. But then I discovered, by accident, that I could sing, and with that talent and very good grades (way better than most... I was the 8th grade Salutatory) I got into Music and Art for voice.

And that freshman year, we read George Orwell's Animal Farm.

It messed me up... because this was, apparently, the dark side of communism. At least that's how the teacher presented it. And it was the first time I was really forced to question things I had learned.

In January when I got evicted, in attempt to secure a "one-shot" deal, I applied for public assistance. I got PA briefly, but then I started to work, and after my first paycheck, welfare cut me off. I sent in the paperwork required to extend my Medicaid... I even made a note of the date: July 5th. The cut-off date was the 11th. And I'm guessing Medicaid didn't get my paperwork in time, so they cut me off on August 1.

It's a simple thing, going down there with my proof (I'm well under the income limit, living under my roommate's lease and on payroll for $250 gross a week) but God knows the thought of dealing with them just sends me into knots. And I'm afraid to do it online, because I know it won't get processed. I need to get over my dread and just do it, because I've now been without asthma medication since September. And for the first time in YEARS, I had a real attack last night. Asthma sucks. It forces me to double-think everything I'd like to do... like go get my hair done (cuz I made some extra money working with BigMan selling pictures the other night), or going down to an Occupy Wall Street meeting.

I've been paying attention to OWS. There are still things that disturb me about it... mostly to do with the lack of brown faces I see associated with it. And based on my own life and in talking to other brown faces, the lack of brown faces has mostly to do with a lack of time. Most brown faces feel that their daily struggle--which existed long before the struggle began lapping at toes of lighter-hued folk--takes up a lot of time. In particular, brown mothers of sons would rather spend their time administering to football leagues and school involvement, cooking, laundry and work than go down to OWS because the former collection of efforts is a tangible way to keep theirs sons from the hazards of poverty and racial profiling by the police. Whereas, OWS is more longterm and sort of not in the realm of immediate results. But mothers that I've talked to are interested and hopeful, but wish to hear more solid, tangible things they can do from home. Like close bank accounts. Or boycott Black Friday.

On a day like today, when I'm sitting here writing, waiting to see if my lungs will clear up so I can selfishly go get my hair done, I contemplate OWS and how it relates to brown faces, and my fear is that these brown faces will be late to the party.  And the party has everything to do with them. Without them, without actively acknowledging how this country came to to be, how brown faces and red faces were systematically brutalized and marginalized in the name of capitalism, I worry that this party is going to be just another "Animal Farm".

Yup, I know that's a leap... but my mind races when I have asthma.

It's Not The Truth Till The White Man Says It's So*...

...and other incoherent musings on what pisses me off about Occupy Wall Street...

*I'm paraphrasing my grandfather here, who's actual quote was "The Black Man won't believe it till the white man says it's so".

I've been wrestling with what to say for about a year now, long before this Occupation. And, for the most part, I'm happy that the REAL issues facing the everyday Joe and Jane are finally coming to light. My basic problem with it though, is that Lashonda, Raekwon, Javier and Milagros have been saying this same shit for a good couple of years now:

• we were laid off/fired
• unemployment ran out
• Medicaid doesn't cover us/won't cover what we need
• the rent is too damn high
• how come I can't afford shit even though I work HARD, and #NameThatBillionaire is actually MAKING money????

It was always expected in this country that there would be a lower class. It was always expected that this lower class consisted mostly of brown-skinned people, some the descendants of slaves but more recently random brownskinned folk from a multitude of third world countries. When shit FIRST started getting tight, it was very easy to blame it on the influx of immigrants "taking our jobs". The brownskinned people already living here were mostly dismissed, since {begin sarcasm} they are mostly to blame for their own poverty.  They don't have an interest in education, pop out babies so they can live high off the welfare hog, don't like to work, and are born criminals.{/endSarcasm} Let's call those people, for the purpose of this post, "the riffraff".

Putting aside all the factors that LED to the creation of the riffraff, the riffraff themselves have always known that the only hope out of this cycle was education, or sports. Oh, and maybe rap music. And most of them, despite popular stereotypes, work hard--harder than you can imagine--to get out. But when the economy first started to turn, they were the ones to get cut out first... the maintenance people, the blue collar worker, the union worker. And whatever little gains their families had made to escape the riffraff pool were lost. But their complaints were met with deaf ears. And what's worse... other brownskinned people slightly above the riffraff pool had all kinds of comments like:

• "You just need to get over yourself and get any piece of job. So what you have to work for minimum wage! Work in McDonalds! Clean floors!"
• "You're just lazy! You don't want to read, don't want to learn. You LIKE standing on street corners! Work harder!"

The problem with the former statement is that it's not really as simple as taking any old piece of job. It comes down to math, so let me illustrate in numbers:

On paper, you're a single mother of two living in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bronx. Off-paper, you do have a partner/most likely the father of both your kids but probably the father of one of your kids. He probably has a kid someplace else for which he's paying child support. Your rent is about $1200 but only because you've been living there a few years.

For the year, your...
Combined income before taxes is $78,000
After Taxes/deductions/child support it's more like $62,000.

Monthly, that's $5,166

These things are essential to daily living:
Rent:  -$14,400
You don't drive, need monthly metrocards to get to work ($104 per month per person): -  $2496
Con Ed (about $160 a month for light/gas, more in the summer if you have a few air conditioners)   -$1560
Cable/Internet/House phone (he watches sports/it  keeps the kids quiet. Note: Cablevision is significantly cheaper than TimeWarner in Manhattan) -$2160
Laundry (assuming you do it yourself in laundromat) - $600
Food (not eating out/cooking most meals/snacks for the kids) - $6,000
Your once-yearly clothes shopping for kids (even if they wear uniforms, they still need regular clothes. I'm estimating an average of $100 per month per family member... that's a lot but I'm being generous and bear in mind that kids shoes are expensive)   - $4,800
Your pet, 1 cat... litter, food, etc.  -$430
Household items (dish /laundry detergent, soap, shampoo, toothpaste - you spend an average of $160 a month at Target or Walmart) - $1,800
Medical co-pays/prescriptions (you live in the Bronx. They say your kids have asthma) -$600

That brings you to $34, 846 going out, and on paper, you're left with $27,154 for the year. And that looks good on paper, but in reality this is about $522 a week which is easily hemorrhaged by buying lunch, a few take out dinners, a trip to the beach or God forbid, a Yankee game. You take a vacation as a family once, go to the movies a few times, throw two birthday parties year, probably save a good amount for the kid's college tuition which is automatically deducted from your net income. It's also not taking into account ANY student loans you or your partner probably have, credit card debt (even if at this point it's manageable), the cellphone plan. And, you're a good parent so your kids have lessons of some sort... karate, basketball camp, football, music lessons. If your kids are under a certain age you pay a baby sitter. If you ARE lucky and do have a piece of a car, add insurance, gas, maintenance, car payments. If you live like this, you are by no means rich and probably wonder just where your money goes, but at least you have jobs.

Then one of you loses their job. Or maybe one of you was only part time to begin with because of the kids. Or you both lose your jobs. The absolute worst case is if one or both of you are a Creative/Artist.

The maximum amount of Unemployment you can get in NYC is $405 a week. If you're smart, you take taxes out of that unemployment unless you're sure at the end of  the year it won't cost you on your tax return. This would leave you with about $365 per check. If both of you collect unemployment, that's WAY less than what you're used to working with, but you can manage for a while. On paper it's $3240 a month. But remember... you no longer have health insurance. And you're not sure how long you will be unemployed. You go for foodstamps.

The maximum GROSS income a family of four can receive a month in order to qualify for foodstamps in New York City is $2238 (less than half of what you were bringing in when you both worked), so no foodstamps for you. You can probably get Medicaid, once your COBRA plan expires.

You cut all the extra stuff, maybe even pare down your cable bill. It's hard to renegotiate phone contracts despite what they tell you. You may get some relief from your student loans. Maybe ONE month from the credit card companies.

But your unemployment is prolonged, and the hundreds of applications you've applied for are met with silence. Not even a "I'm sorry but you don't qualify". You start to consider those minimum wage jobs, but get this... $7 an hour for 35 hours equals $245.... HALF of what you'll make on unemployment. So you ride it out. Because if you start to work at $7 an hour, and say you can't hack it or get fed up or something else happens and you leave that job, you can't re-instate your unemployment if you've been at the job less than a few weeks or made less than a certain amount of money. I know this, because I made that mistake...

More likely you'll find something part time at about $13 an hour. This could bring in about  $206 a week, after taxes. It's still less than unemployment, but if unemployment has run out you're damn grateful for $206. But certain expenses will remain the same... carfare for one. The cost of food. Rent. Cell phones... if you work and have kids in the city that need to travel by themselves you get to rely on having a cell.

Either unemployment runs out or you take a job paying less than what you're worth OR, you just have no income. You fall behind in the rent. Screw the credit card, eventually you just stop paying. Hey, now you can apply for Welfare. But the MINUTE you apply you get sucked into the Back-to-work program, better known as F.E.G.S. Welfare now requires you work 35 hours a week doing SOMETHING in order to get benefits. But you can't make over a certain amount of money... which is less than the Food Stamp guidelines. If you only work part time, say 20 hours a week, the other 30 hours you MUST spend at F.E.G.S unless you can document a reason you can't. F.E.G.S says there are jobs out there, they will find one for you... and sometimes they do. But again, the minute that job pays over a certain amount... byebye welfare. If F.E.G.S is unable to find you employment in your field... (and really... if YOU couldn't find a job in your field, how in the hell is F.E.G.S going to??) they put you to work in the welfare job center itself.  And if you happen to be a creative/artist/writer/musician and you think you can make money freelancing while looking for a job, guess what? F.E.G.S won't let you: in order to release you they need documented proof you're working, usually in the form of a paystub. But if you're freelance, you don't get paystubs. Think you can supply proof of payment? Sure! but you don't' get paid till you do the work, right? Right. And F.E.G.S won't release you to be home working without a paystub. Fuck it, you fume. I'll just stay home and work and supply the proof later. But if you don't come in with documented proof (in the form of a paystub) by the Friday of the week you were out, F.E.G.S tells welfare you are "FTC'd. "Failure To Comply". You get bumped off welfare INSTANTLY. Think you can just explain and be reinstated? Guess again. You have to apply for welfare ALL OVER AGAIN.

So fuck welfare. You'll do without it.

If you fall far enough behind in your rent, the landlord starts sending you notices. If you fall far enough behind in your credit card, they may sue you. Force you into a payment plan by threatening you with a judgement and ruining your credit. I have been sued both by Capitol One and by Chase... in the neighborhood of $5,000 combined. No, really.

Back to the landlord. He progresses from 30-day notices to 7-day notices to eviction notices. You try to get a "one-shot" deal from Human Resources (same office, by the way, as Food Stamps and Welfare, officially called TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). If your rent arrears are too high... they won't pay. If they feel your rent is too high (stick a pin in that thought), they won't pay. If they think you don't have the income to pay back the "one shot" (turns out this is a LOAN, not a GRANT), they won't pay. And, even if they offer you some money for you rent arrears, the landlord can always say "no--I want it all". Mine did.

That rent thing... remember Welfare has an idea of what rent SHOULD be, and how much they will pay. And that amount is $900 for a family of two (not sure what it is for the imaginary family of four, but it's not much more than $900). So if you find an apartment, the lease needs to say $900. If it says more, then you have to explain to them how you intend to pay the rest of it. And this is where that partner thing gets dangerous... if you list that you  have a partner, then HIS income needs to be included. And if his income combined with yours is more than the guidelines, byebye welfare, byebye one-shot. Instant case closed. Average rent in Harlem these days--still the cheapest average rent in Manhattan--is $1460. For a studio. That forces you to look in really scary neighborhoods for a rent you can afford/welfare will pay for.

And by the way... between the lapsed student loans, the defaulted credit card debt, the eviction or utility shut off, your credit is WRECKED.

Bye-bye job opportunities.

Many employers now run a credit check as part of their decision to hire you. If you worked in payroll or accounting you are FUCKED. And if you're in your thirties or forties, employers bet you can't really work for peanuts because you have kids and a household to maintain... so they give that job to the younger person who presumably has no ties. Yes, that's illegal. But look around you... who amongst you is mostly employed, and who isn't?

OK, so back to the Occupy Wall Street. I did say this was incoherent, right? While Ray, Shawnie, Millie and Javi have been pressed through the spin cycle the last few years, Joe and Jane have suddenly realized they are in the same spin as the riffraff. They are scared for their future. They decide to sit in Zuccotti park, which by the way, is a public space but is privately owned. They are mostly white, mostly young. The police are used to doing what they do... getting these people off this public but privately owned land because the person who owns that land called the police and asked for these people to be removed. But the Occupiers are young and white, and that dumb-ass Bologna got caught pepperspraying white girls, and it makes the news.

I have friends who are police officers. One or two of them I love as people, and I understand that they are used to seeing the worst of human beings on a daily basis, and this makes them jaded. I also understand that people are assholes and like to fuck with cops. Actually let me correct myself: white people like to fuck with cops because any brown-skinned person knows that fucking with the cops is like playing Russian Roulette. It could end badly.

My high regard for the individual officer aside, as a whole, I am no fan of the police force in general. I have seen them jack up fare jumpers on the subway. They arrest black men for bullshit like walking between subway cars. And I'm sorry the Occupiers have a taste of what it's like to be black, but I am now extremely annoyed that four white girls getting pepper-sprayed causes a major stir but the police who arrested "Skyyvokka" for handing money to a crackhead who was panhandling outside a club one night, after chasing down the cab he jumped into, hauling the kid out, arresting him, taking him downtown, cavity-searching him and then releasing him because no drugs were found and he is neither a drug abuser or a dealer... THOSE cops will never be corrected. That shit never makes the news.

The second thing that annoys me is the focus of the protest. "Wall Street" isn't the problem. Yes, companies like Chase and Capitol One and the infamous Goldman Sachs are running roughshod and barebacked over us. (To sue unemployed me in Bronx Supreme Court for a total of $5K... really???? And yet you got bailed out?) But they are only partially to blame. There will always be a small percentage of the world having most of the money. It's the object of the game to be part of that 1%. And they are so far up the food chain, that 1%, it really doesn't affect us. But it's the fukkers just below that who have fukked us over. In my opinion, the corporations choking the life out of  Ray and Shawnie, Millie and Javi and now Jane and John are non-publicly traded, privately owned corporations like these,

--or the giant real estate conglomerates that have jacked up rent in New York so badly that you normal people really cannot afford to live here.

--or the giant drug companies that have so fucked up the health care system that our sickest people go without medicine. I have a theory that there is a deal going on between Medicaid and the asthma medication makers. Whole tracts of the Bronx are asthma zones. Medicaid will pay for a $300 a month prescription for Advair. But it won't approve or pay for a monthly prescription of Nasonex ($130) which controls the allergies that trigger some asthma.

--or the hedge fund industry who bet against the American economy (that's how it was explained to me when I worked at one, anyhow). Reading the linked article, please note that many of these companies are supposedly "Headquartered" in Europe. But their owners actually live in Connecticut. Or Long Island. Those companies exist legally outside the U.S. for the benefit of the SEC, but trust me... those bastards live and work here.

--or those small, unnoticed companies that masquerade as arms of the government, like F.E.G.S. which has somehow have hooked up the NYC Human Resources Administration but is intermittently listed as "not for profit" or "privately owned."

So I get that people are frustrated and want to shake the system up. Maybe sitting in the park or blocking off the Brooklyn Bridge might do that, but I seriously doubt it. And the various unions signing on doesn't impress me. Because unions only protect their own as long as their own are employed and paying dues. The signing of songs and dancing of dances and sharing of food doesn't impress me... nobody is singing and dancing on the Food Stamp application line up in the Bronx... you can't even eat in those offices while you wait all damn day, let alone share some food. And no, the people standing in line won't risk losing their benefits to come down and sit in the park with you. That line to apply/ask a question/get a damn application is so long that it takes you all day--the line is literally halfway down the block, and snaked through various corridors once you get inside the building just to check in to "reception"--and if that day you took to stand on line has already cost you a day of work and you're doing this on your day off... naaah...they're not coming down.

Screaming that Wall Street needs to be regulated probably won't get the government to regulate Wall Street. First of all, the government is owned by the drug companies and the oil companies, and is being influenced by the hedge fund people. Scream enough and they may throw you a bone, like a Black president for example, but we all know how that worked out...

America needs a "movement". We need something to inspire us, since our Black President, the poor bastard, let us down (the one thing I will take away from watching them beat down Obama is that it doesn't pay to be ethical in America. To play "nice" is to be "weak". Ironic, isn't it?).

And just as a last irony... as I finally finish this random and incoherent vent, I learn that Steve Jobs has died. Certainly a brilliant man. Changed computing forever. A man with a vision...

... who almost single-handedly destroyed the music industry with iTunes which in turn decimated the graphic designer's dream job of designing memorable CD covers...
...who created a system of computers that are mostly incompatible with anything but Apple/putting a serious dent in the creation of other technology...
...who has addicted an ENTIRE generation of people to instant gratification in the palms of their hands...

...so it's kind of ironic to see these kids protesting corporate giants while Tweeting and Facebooking and uploading videos of every minute of this demonstration on their iPhones...

Again... Required reading
The Manhattan Rental Market Report, Sept. 2011
The Largest Private Companies - Forbes 2006 
Hedge Funds' Bets Pay Off - WSJ

Remember September...

I'd said I wasn't going to do this, and here I am adding to the rehash.

But I realized, looking over this blog, I don't think I ever really wrote about 9/11. Not in depth. And I also realized that as many pictures as I have taken in my life... easily in the 50,000 range, I took no pictures that day. Not one. And I could see the smoke across the bay from City Island... I even went down to Ground Zero that October, and I never took a picture.

Part of it, I think, is because I used to work there. I had only left my job at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (as it was known then) about a year before because a former co-worker and friend called me to work for him at one of the last "dot.coms." He said the new gig was "family friendly." My Sun was just about a year old, and my relationship with his dad was--and always had been--tumultuous so there was a lot I was doing on my own.  I joined my friend's company because commuting to midtown would be easier and because I could work 10a-6p, which made it easier to pack my young baby up, get him to my mom's and still get to work on time. Turns out, not only was the company NOT family-friendly, it was about to take a nosedive and they canned me in less than a year, my friend shortly thereafter. After 9/11 he called me to say how horrible he had felt about convincing me to leave a great job at a great company, but I told him, he probably saved my life. It's highly likely I wouldn't have left Morgan Stanley otherwise.

I ended up at a company that did the back-office work for independent hedge fund investors, making a shitload of cash for someone with no college degree. But I couldn't hack that place... I got myself into all kinds of shit and walked out on the job on August 8, 2001.

I got a good severance package. They wanted to keep me quiet. I had been having an affair with my married boss and when I ended it, trying to work shit out--yet again--with the Sun's dad, my boss made my life a living hell. I really had no intention of suing him or the job for sexual harassment, though I surely could have. It was textbook harassment. But at the time I was really scared of the Sun's dad. I was more afraid of what he would do to me than I was mad about the job situation--and plus I'd brought it on myself. When I fuck up, I fuck up good, but I own my fuck-ups. I think my boss didn't want me to make a stink cuz it turned out he'd had some trouble someplace else, and gave me full pay for the next few months, plus my health care plan for 6 months. It was a sweet deal. And for the first time, at age 39 I decided that I was finally going to follow the family business, my inescapable destiny... and my heart's calling, to be a creative. I applied to Pratt Institute and to SVA for graphic design, but in order to support my application I enrolled myself in a drawing class at SVA.

By this time, my beautiful little boy was two and a half. We had just weaned. The day I quit the hedge fund I'd gone to my mom's to pick him up. I wore a long, yellow poloshirt dress. I normally only nursed him at night now, but because I was in a state that day and he was surprised to see me, he insisted on "boobie, please." I hiked up my dress up and nursed him, talking to my mom about why I'd quit. It turned out that was the last time I nursed him. I was still on my "mom's list"... an email list of about 100-150 women who had supported me through nursing, pumping milk at work, weaning and various other issues.

The morning of September 11, I had planned to go downtown with Bigbear and my Sun to Pearl Paint and buy stuff for the drawing class. But I woke up a little later than I had intended. I looked out my kitchen window. Ten years later I can still remember the legendary crisp blue sky. Nary a cloud. I began to have second thoughts about going downtown, because it was too nice a day. Sipping on my giant mug of Bustelo, I picked up the phone to call Bigbear and tell her I'd changed my mind. I flipped on the "Today" show to see what the weather would be like for the next few days so I could make a plan, and saw the World Trade Center on the screen.

One of the towers was on fire.

When I first started at MSDW, my department was located on the 70th floor. The company occupied twenty-three floors in 2WTC, starting on 59 through 74. I'm pretty sure the cafeteria was on 44, one flight below the 45th floor "sky lobby". There was one floor that wasn't really a floor. One of our engineers explained to me how it was really a large air vent system, designed to bring fresh air up into the higher floors. Each floor was constructed as a square within a square... all the elevators and staircases were in the center square, and usually whatever secretaries or assistants there were tended to have their cubes around the outside of the square. The offices were along the outside square, so that pretty much every office had a window. Every floor had it's own server room.

Every morning I would ride the huge elevators up to the 45th floor skylobby, and then take another elevator up to 70. I was single, I wasn't really dating yet after a bad break up, and I had nothing to do but work. I would get there about 8:30, make my rounds to the floors I serviced to switch out back up tapes and about 9:30, right before the cafeteria closed, my co-worker and I (the only two girls in the department) would sneak down and have breakfast. We'd do more rounds, then go to lunch. Sometimes we'd go hide out and chat in the server rooms, or take turns running down to the concourse level and go shopping.

I often worked late. In the winter when it got dark early, I would sometimes stand in the floor-to-ceiling windows, press myself against the glass and look straight down. It would feel like floating. I met my Sun's dad and got pregnant, and my Sun was born in March of '99. I took Family Medical Leave so I could be with my baby for three months, but when I came back that June, my department welcomed me back. My boss would let me bring my little boy with me to work on Fridays that summer, and SD would wait for us on West Street and drive us home.

Every three months we had fire drills. When I first got there, my co-worker was the female searcher. It was her job to search all the women's bathrooms in case of a fire. When she got married and left, I gladly took her place. We took those fire drills seriously at MSDW, and we all knew Rick Rescorla because he usually led the drills himself, and there was usually a fireman with him.

One day during a drill, we had a new-ish employee. Rick was explaining how fire and smoke travel upward, so if a fire broke out on our floor, 70, or above, we should immediately get to our designated staircase and travel downward. If the fire was below us, we should try to travel down, but if that were not possible, go up two floors. "If we're on a really high floor, would we be able to get to the roof" the new guy asked? I remember Rick saying that the roof was usually locked, so it was better to travel downward since the smoke and fire would still try to go upwards. "But what if we can't get past the fire?" the new guy insisted.

The fireman with Rick said "Don't worry, we'll get you out".

That morning, watching the burning tower on TV, I wondered if Rick and the fireman would be able to get those people out. It looked really high up. I called my mom. I told her that given the fire, we DEFINITELY shouldn't go downtown. It was too nice a day anyhow, and I still wasn't dressed. I hung up, still watching the Today show, Katy and Matt discussing the terrible accident of a plane and a building.

The woman they were talking to screamed that the other building exploded and the cameras panned away from the top of the first building to the second one, where a fireball was mushrooming. And I think everyone in NY realized at that moment that this was no accident. That we were at war.

At 9:20, I posted to my mom's group:

OH MY GOD
The Word Trade Center.... A year and a half ago, I was in one of
those buildings.... on the 59th floor. 2 years ago I was on the 70th
Floor.

They got both of them. I was watching TV and SAW the second one
explode.

I still know people there!

Oh, I pray for them....

Our usual mommy chatter about new pregnancies, night-weaning and Sesame Street software dwindled and was replaced with the various reports coming in, checking on each other and husbands who may have worked in the city.

At 9:57a I posted:

We're in some deep shit. 'Scuse the french. Somebody also just
bombed the pentagon.

Oh my God.

After that, the day became a blur. The towers fell. Son's Dad, who worked at Verizon came over to check on us. He was crying. And I realized that day that our relationship was pretty much doomed, because his tears didn't move me. I spent the day trying to shield my boy from the images on the TV, checking reports, trying to fathom what my world was becoming. I worried about my ex-coworkers. I wondered if all those drills had done us good... and it turns out they had. I tried to tune out the recurring mental image of seeing a plane come through those windows, skidding through the center core and exploding out the other side.

The world outside became eerily quiet, as the airplane traffic I normally heard coming in to land at nearby LaGuardia was grounded. And then the crazy roar of fighter jets. In the afternoon, I walked down to the beach with a friend, my crazy-haired baby walking beside us, still bright, still happy. I looked down at him, wondering what his world would be like, if war would touch him. There were two Mexican day-laborers sitting on the tiny pier; they had been there all morning. In Spanish, they told my friend they had seen the towers collapse, had felt the ground rumble all the way across the water.

My sister drove down to get her children; the Diva from High School in Times Square, MoodMagic Barbie from her elementary in East Harlem. Poppy was working at the college in Westchester. And all the bridges back into the city were closed, all the trains stopped. So SD and I drove up to get him. No one was on the road. Everyone's car was parked, everyone was home. No one but us was on the road...

The smoke billowed for weeks, every day just as grey and puffy as the day before. It became clear that there were no injured, no bodies. People just didn't come home; my mom's neighbor Chantal Vincelli, another friend of a friend. I combed the lists of the missing to see if any of my former co-workers were on it, but I didn't see any. I heard they all got out. Except for Rick.

A few weeks later, I started my class at SVA. I hadn't been downtown since the towers fell, and I took the F train to 23rd street. When I came out of the subway, there were fliers papering the station: MISSING. HAVE YOU SEEN HER? LAST SEEN.... when I came out of the station, there were more fliers, littering the streets, riding the gutters, papering the walls. Hundreds of them.

In October, I took the train to Chambers, my old stop. As soon as the doors opened I smelled that smell... of death and fire and sadness. I walked my old route, the empty sky overpowering me. Everything was blocked off, so I cut down a side street and from afar I could see the jagged remains, like some huge skeleton, and mountains of rubble.

So that's my 9/11 story. Every year, even though I don't normally write much about it, I think of my old co workers and wonder if they ever recovered. I think of my friend's friend Joyce, of Meggie's brother, of Chantal. I try not to succumb to the media hype and the replays, I try not to search out the pictures anymore. One day, maybe I'll post the pictures I took of my cube and my view out the 70th floor windows, and the lobby.

And the image above...  I may "retire" it after this year, but I'm not sure. I've never trashed a file before. There aren't many physical copies around. I created this image a few years after 9/11, when I was a student at Pratt Institute. The first print I matted and framed, and took it to the 49th precinct in the Bronx and gave it to them. The officer at the desk looked at me a little blankly. I often wonder what happened to that print, if they still have it, if they know that it meant something to me to give it to them.
I sold another print to a good friend and fabulous supporter, and one year I made magnets out of the image and sold them at a craft fair, donating half the proceeds to AmeriCares.

I thought to revamp the image this year, but it didn't work out. I guess it wasn't meant to.

I still have four that I printed and signed last year, but I think that's it. I think I won't print them anymore.

It's not that I think we shouldn't commemorate 9/11... I think we should always pause to remember. But I think that for those of us who didn't suffer a direct loss, we should step back and allow those that did to live... to grieve, to recover.

And I think that for the rest of us, we should use this day to remind ourselves that America is SUPPOSED to be tolerant of other religions and beliefs. We say we are, but we're not. In the years that followed that terrible day, the persecution and profiling of our Muslim Americans disgust me. Our treatment of immigrants, legal or no, has gotten worse. If we give in to the hate that was visited on us that day, we are no better than those that wish our annihilation.

Except for Bin Laden. For the record... Obama gets big props from me, for getting Bin Laden. He got his just desserts.

I Miss Writing

...lately I miss it a lot. I poke around blogworld and it's interesting to see who writes, still. Most people, including me, like the interaction of FB or the shortness of Twitter. I haven't gotten into Twitter..... I think the people worth following are witty and I'm not that witty. I can be funny, but I'm not witty. I do have a "Tumblr". It took me a long while to get to Tumblr. But what I like about it is it's much easier to upload photos t it. And that's what I've been doing a lot of lately... cellphone snaps that I post to Tumblr.

But I miss organizing my thoughts and writing them out. It's just that by the time I get around to writing now, I'm exhausted.  And the mornings have not settled "in" yet, now that school is back in session. But I need to get back.

Have I got stories...