Dry Bones Dance

Whatever pops into my head

I'm working on a writing project at the moment, which is taking most of my deep thoughts at the moment, so here is a random list of what is popping into my head at the moment:

- Observation about online dating: White guys do not like me, but I seem to be relatively popular with Black and Asian men. In real life, I seem to attract primarily Black and Latino men. This does not bother me - I'm just curious as to why this is. I have always been more popular with men of color than with white men. Despite the fact that I am white and Christian (or at least Christian-ish), something about a common religion compounds things, so that if you put me in a room full of single, white Christian guys, I would stand a better chance of getting a date in a gay bar - unless they are all fifty or over. For some reason, the fifty and up crowd digs me. I've been hit on by men who are dangerously close to elderly.

Why I should not watch TV

I watched three episodes of Fat March last night. I have no idea why I did this, but it was some sort of train wreck fascination, and I couldn't tear myself away from it, even though I was appalled. I will give the creators of this show credit - they have managed to brilliantly display American cultures's disordered relationship with our bodies and food.

The show involves twelve people, all of whom are obese and say that they get virtually no exercise. The show is them sleeping in tents and walking over 500 miles from Boston to Washington D.C with two rather annoying personal trainers with weekly challenges and weigh-ins. Each participant has a chance to win a $100,000 share of the $1.2 million cash prize, but for every participant who quits or is voted off, everyone remaining loses $10,000. Each day, they walk anywhere from 9 to 14 miles.

By the end of the three episodes I watched, two people had quit, one had been voted off, and FOUR different participants were taken to the emergency room for dehydration, heat exhaustion or stress fractures. One of the remaining participants had been walking for several days with intense pain in his knee. During the third show, he said that every time he took a step his knee was hyper-extending. I'm going to guess that he will be the next person to end up in the hospital.

Texts of terror: Dead concubines and war

In the last part of Judges, chapters 19 – 21, here’s what happened: An unnamed Levite from Ephraim had a concubine, also unnamed. For some reason, this woman left him and returned to her father’s house. I don’t know what her reasons were, but most likely there was some pretty horrific treatment involved. Women were little more than property in most societies at that time, and Israel wasn’t any different. Concubines ranked even lower than regular wives and had minimal expectations for how they would be treated, and the society of that time was extremely punishing towards women who left their men. After four months of separation, the Levite went to “speak tenderly to her and bring her back.” She didn’t have a lot of options, and I’m sure her father pushed her to go back with him. After feasting with the woman’s father for several days, he, the concubine, and a servant headed home. They stopped in Gibeah for the night, and an old man took the three of them in.

The men of Gibeah surrounded the old man’s house, pounding on the doors and demanding that the Levite come out so they could have sex with him. The host went outside and said, “This man is my guest! You can’t do that, but I’m open to compromise. Why don’t you take my virgin daughter and this concubine instead? Do whatever you want to them, just don’t do anything to this man.”

The men of Gibeah did not like this plan, so the Levite grabbed his concubine and pushed her out the door. The men of Gibeah took what they were given and abused and gang-raped her all night. As dawn broke, they let her go. The woman went back to the old man’s house and fell down dead.

Ten phone calls, one hour and thirty two minutes

First, I got a letter from the Franchise Tax Board saying that I owed the state of California an additional $700 in income tax because of something connected to lines 31 through 34. My taxes are not that complicated because I am single and own no property and my only investments are my IRAs, so I was pretty sure they were wrong. I only had to call seven times and be put on hold for a total of one hour and seventeen minutes - and yes, I was timing it because I was on hold and had nothing better to do.

I finally got to talk to a real live person, and could not make her understand my situation. All she would say was that the law required that I pay my taxes, which is something I already understood. She, however, seemed completely incapable of understanding anything that I was saying.

Texts of terror project: Rizpah

There’s a story in the second book of Samuel, twenty-first chapter.

Now there was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year, and David inquired of the Lord. The Lord said, “There is blood-guilt on Saul and on his house because he put the Gibeonites to death.’ So the king called the Gibeonites and spoke to them. “Now the Gibeonites were not of the people of Israel, but of the remnant of the Amorites; although the people of Israel had sworn to spare them, Saul had tried to wipe them out in his zeal for the people of Israel and Judah.” David said to the Gibeonites, ‘What shall I do for you? How shall I make expiation, that you may bless the heritage of the Lord?”

As far as David’s role in this story goes goes, this part is so far, so good. He’s trying to make amends. God, however, is another story. Is it the God who actually exists or the one the Hebrews projected? What kind of God is this exactly, who starves his people for the sins of a man now dead? Or does God know that we tend to ignore injustice until we get a little hungry? I don’t know, but the story continues.

Ode to Jane Kenyon

After several years of reading very little, I’m back to my old reading habits of at least a couple of books a week. I’ve been reading Otherwise, Jane Kenyon’s last book of poems that she finished compiling on her deathbed. I discovered her years ago through a poetry workshop. One of my fellow workshop-ees, a lovely and talented man whose poems involved a lot of whiskey and fishing, sent me her Having it Out with Melancholy , possibly because all my poems were about death or addiction or some sort of crazy, and he felt I would relate.

There were a couple of periods in my life where dying seemed like an eminently reasonable thing to do, and I was utterly convinced that not one person on the planet would miss me if I offed myself. I remember being a little surprised when I realized that not everybody fantasized daily about being dead. Even after I had made the decision to stay permanently in the land of the living, I read her line of "tired of trying to be stouthearted, tired beyond measure,” and thought sweet Jesus, somebody gets how hard it is every day to just keep going and keep getting out of bed, when it doesn’t really get better, and when it does, you know it won’t last.

We Found a Bomb and We Used It

On this date in 1945, we dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. 130,000 people died. Three days before, we dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima from a plane named Enola Gaya fter the pilot’s mother in Iowa. The bomb killed 74,000 and leveled 90% of the buildings. Most of the footage and photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were deemed classified and not shown to the public, until they were declassified in 1996. The photographer who filmed it entered a monastery after the war and took a vow of silence.

In honor of this anniversary of sorts, I saw the film Original Child Bomb tonight, named after a Thomas Merton poem, Original Child Bomb: Points for Meditation to be Scratched on the Walls of a Cave. He got the name from what may or may not be an overly literal translation of the Japanese word for atom bomb.

Guide Your Way On

I love Kundalini yoga, and tonight was one of those times where it felt like I connected with something deep and healing, and a weight inside broke apart a little bit. That doesn’t happen all or even most of the time, but when it does, it makes me remember why I am such a yoga evangelist.

Tonight the teacher was Jim, who is chubby with long gray hair, subbing for Lauren, a yoga teacher/actor who is young and thin and tends to speak in slightly ethereal tones during class. She is either at some sort of yoga training, or she’s off being a pirate wench again. I didn’t know there was a market for that sort of thing, but last time she was gone for a couple of weeks, she was on some sort of tour. Maybe they need wenches in Iowa. Who knows?

I like Jim. He’s very affirming.

“I see some of you are doing the full pose and some of you are doing some good modifications. Super!”
“Now, remember, if your back starts hurting, go down until it doesn’t hurt anymore. That’s right. Super!”
“Now, you can do the shoulder stand or if that’s too much for you, just lie on your back with your legs straight up in the air. Who you are today is who you are. Super!”

Sky after Storm

The past few days it feels like the sun is finally beginning to peek out from behind the clouds of this funk I've been in for a month. I still have nothing figured out, but I have made a "get my shit together" to-do list, which should count for something. Also, I have decided I need to get out more.

I went to a free concert last night, because I am the queen of free these days, and listened to Andy Palacio and the Garifuna Collective from Belize, which was fun because Jen and I were in the middle of a bunch of happy Belizeans. (BTW, if you live in LA, you should totally check out the Grand Performances downtown in California Plaza. They do a fantastic job of showcasing music, dance, and film from all the corners of the world and it's all free.)

Social justice and the pathologically self aware

There was another double homicide in northwest Pasadena last week. Over the past few months, there has been a nasty spate of violence in the section of Pasadena where I now live. There was a shooting on my block a couple of weeks after I moved in, complete with yellow tape and ghetto birds and the police knocking on my door at midnight to ask me what I saw and heard. Fortunately, they just got the guy in the leg and no one died. There’s a fair amount of black/brown tension in Pasadena, and most of the violence seems to be related to that and/or gang disputes or enforcement.

As an adult, I’ve never not lived in a neighborhood where there wasn’t at least an occasional shooting, so I’m not unduly concerned about my personal safety. I don’t walk alone at night, and I lock my house up good at night before I go to sleep, and for the most part, white girls don’t get shot. And only a moron would break in because my house has no cash, no expensive jewelry, and an incredibly paltry selection of electronics – a four year old laptop, the cellphone I got for free for signing a contract, and a cheap stereo that only works if you press the buttons just right. It would be a very disappointing haul.

One of the buildings on my block is owned by a major LA slumlord, and for the past couple of months, the Pasadena PD has been cracking down on the gangs, drug dealing and prostitution happening there, so there have been cop cars on the block several times a week. It seems to be working, or at least there are three transvestite prostitutes that I used to see almost daily, working the street, and I haven’t seen them in a few weeks.

A couple blocks away from my house, you will see anywhere from ten to thirty Latino men hanging out on the sidewalk hoping that someone will stop and put them to work. I guess the nearby hardware store won’t let them in the parking lot. Some of them will get work right away and others will wait all day. The children in the apartment building next door to me play in the parking lot because entire families are crammed into one bedroom apartments that don’t come cheap. A SMALL one bedroom in the building two doors down from me is going for $875 a month.

Shootings and gangs and poverty are not the whole truth about where I live. The majority of people are first-generation immigrants of varying legal status who work damn hard and do the best they can. There’s a very well-maintained and stable affordable housing apartment complex across the street from me, a farmer’s market on Tuesdays, and a community center a block away. The high school dropout rate is pretty bad, but there are many success stories as well. Unlike some parts of the L.A. metropolitan area, any neighborhood is in fairly close proximity to great wealth and between the tax base, churches, non-profits and business community, there are a lot of resources to work with.

Like most cities, there are two Pasadenas. There’s the one with the Rose Parade and private schools and Pottery Barn and mostly white people, and the mostly black and brown, working class one that struggles with all the things that most low-income communities struggle with. It’s a study in contradiction, and unlike some people, I can choose which Pasadena I live in. All I have to do is walk a few blocks south of the freeway and I can go to six coffee shops, three movie theaters, two independent bookstores, the Pasadena Playhouse, the Gold Line and Old Town Pasadena with its many stores and restaurants.

A few years ago, I would be living where I live as an urban missionary type. I would probably already be volunteering somewhere, and there would be needy people in and out of my house, and I would have only gone to Old Town to judge it. I’ve been so indoctrinated with CCDA’s 3 R’s that I could probably recite them in my sleep. (Racial Reconciliation, Relocation and Redistribution, in case you are curious.)

Now it’s different. I live where I live because I wanted to get out of an apartment building, the price was right, and I thought it would be good for me to live close to good friends. I love my little back house and being there is the best thing for me right now. In a lot of ways, that’s a good thing. It’s much less pressure when I don’t feel like my presence makes a statement that I have to live up to. I now enjoy the concept of boundaries and recognizing what I need in order to emotionally and spiritually function. I love having the freedom to tell the truth about myself. I know the difference between being someone’s caseworker and being someone’s friend. I’m pretty much over the white middle class guilt thing, and most of all, it is a huge relief not to be trying to save people with something that wasn’t saving me.

Even though I still have a certain amount of resentment towards the urban ministry world, I gained a great deal by living in communities of color and working with and for people from very different backgrounds, ethnicities and class, and I wouldn’t trade all of that for anything. I needed something to hold myself together and distract me from myself back then. The 3 R’s are better than heroin and I did at least some good, so for that I am grateful. I don’t need to save myself by saving the world anymore, and I can no longer fit into the model of urban ministry where I spent my twenties and early thirties, so I’m not sure how I want to live in my community now.

I live in very close proximity to very real human suffering and systemic injustice that I do not want to ignore. I want to be involved in my community, but I’m not sure what form that should take. I wonder what role I can or should play when it comes to the violence and problems. I’m not sure what I have to offer. I get a little twitchy at the thought of being a “role model”, even though I’m not nearly as screwed up as I used to be. I don’t know if I have enough emotional reserves yet to deal with anyone else’s suffering, and I question if I am together enough to do much more than wave at the neighbors. Then I worry that I have become intractably selfish.

No doubt, this is the disadvantage of being almost pathologically self-aware.

I don’t have any answers yet, which may be the motto for my life at the moment, as I know where I’ve been but not where I’m going. And I think I used to be funnier. I don't know why I'm so deadly serious lately. Maybe I"ll lighten up soon....