Date:	2009-05-17 15:28
Subject:	5-10 years behind...what?
Security:	Public
Mood:	contemplative

So, this is how i figure it:

I am (generously) around 5 years behind where I want to be in my life. Mostly things like career, money, housing. Relationships I'm behind 10 years or so, but I still think that I could get away with saying 5 years.

The job I have now pays OK and has decent health insurance (as soon as it kicks in).

There's a dream job that's posted that an AmeriCorps VISTA position. Dream job, $900/month, would have to live on food stamps.

Some kid who's willing to live on food stamps is going to take that job, be absolutely transformative, and create a huge new base for themselves to get work done on.

I can't be transformative at this job. I can't even go to the events I want to go to because I'm fucking full-time, 9-5.

I need to figure out how to re-involve my activism into my life. See, this is why I want my JOB to be my activism: because I want to make a difference and learn and share and teach and create with others, but I also want time to hang out with my friends who are gardeners, zookeepers and teachers. People that I wouldn't be able to see if I just kept a 9-5 and then spent the rest of my hours doing activism.

The way I see it right now, people like that chick I read about in the paper who's 8 and the Executive Director of some youth climate coalition and was an intern for the Milwaukee mayor at 17 and an activist at UW-Madision and now works 12-14 hour days is just way, way ahead of me. I mean, she just got started and organized and committed much, much earlier on. Really, I'm just starting right now. Right now. She's got a really wide base to build from. Whoever gets that Americorps position will have a really wide base to build from. My base is narrower, and I have to work to build that up. But if I'm here in this 9-5, how the hell do I do that?

I don't really know what I want. I already know that I don't want a life of 12-14 hour days, even if I am making a difference. And I don't want to be so damn broke all the time.

I need to make some goals. I will start with some unspecified goals, and maybe I'll return to them to make them more SMART. Anyway:
-hoop 1/2 hour a day
-sign up for beginning Yoga classes
-continue learning Spanish
-take a voice lessons class
-take guitar lessons
-make ALL lunches and MOST dinners at home
-keep a tighter budget

See, here's the thing. I'm envious of all these people in my life, but I don't want exactly what they have. Like, L and her world travels--I'm envious of that, but I never wanted and still don't want to go teach English around the world, or even to take soooo much time to travel. I feel like there's so much important stuff going on here, now, that I need to be involved in and make change that my place is here, in the US, more than anything.

G and his money and townhouse and job and drive. I wouldn't mind something of that same status. It seems like he's getting lots of opportunity to be a mover and shaker and changer. If I could get that level of prestige and impact but in my own field, in a job with those hours and that pay, that would be really nice.

N and her lovely office. Do I want to work in the private sector? I don't know. I don't think so, at least not for now. But I don't know how supportive of my life preferences and, also, global long-term impact, that the non-profit complex will be able to provide.

All these people with all this drive and all these ideas. And here I am, just sitting with my big brain and doing nothing with it. My big brain and my fucking cowardice, awkwardness, and insecurity with the rest of my life. Creativity? I don't think that there's a project I've ever come up with on my own--except maybe I have, but then I haven't had the follow-through to be able to actually make something come of it. Ugh.

The closest thing(s?) I can think of that would make me really happy, in the long-term, would be:

• consulting with environmental orgs/campaigns on their anti/racism / diversity policies and practices, as well as consulting with social justice/anti-racist orgs/campaigns on their environmental sustainability issues (my ideal would be to have a partner from the social justice arena, preferably a person of color but I guess not necessarily so, who has happened upon green issues in the past few years the way that I have happened upon anti-racist/social justice issues in the past few years and form a partnership)
• working with local communities, policy-makers, planners, and organizations to create a city-wide climate change adaptation strategy implementation, really along the lines of Majora Carter's Sustainable South Bronx--i.e. adding the currently sorely missing ecological and adaptation component to a H.I.R.E. type campaign and creating, as Majora calls it, a horticultural infrastructure, but one that is strategically and specifically being created to address and adapt to the climate changes, and one that includes equity and justice in its jobs as a specific and fundamentally necessary foundation
• man, I need some organizing work in my experience. I think again, under the ideas above: organizing green folks on social justice issues, organizing social justice folks on green issues. There is such a hole, SUCH a hole when Will Steger spokespeople sit there and basically say that they're only organizing for jobs and equity because it's expedient, and not recognizing the real necessity of doing so.
• Youth, still really love youth. I haven't done stuff with high school age youth since MCC, but I think I would really like to. I really loved doing HECUA and MCC and being that guiding, counseling, facilitating kind of person. That's why that AmeriCorps position would be so great--it combines working with youth and equity and environmental and green jobs and policy issues.

So, I'm trying to find some resources on the talk I volunteered to give, and asked the good folks over at debunkingwhite for some resources in this post. I think I'm working some stuff out, but I got a little bit "it's alllll about meeeeeee" while I was doing so, so here's what I typed that I didn't post there (was going to be in this comment):


oof. I feel like I'm being so dumbly dichotomous, but I still feel caught up in it since I'm going to be extra-responsible for my words and ideas that I'm putting out there, and especially since they're young uns in "my" movement. But still: I feel resistant to catering to the self-interest of the oppressor, but still feel that strategically and for the long-term, showing green white folks why we need to be in it for ourselves, too, would help to prevent short-term, white guilt, "let's help you out" kinds of investments.

And shit, maybe I'm just coming up against my own white guilt in this, too--I mean, typing all this out makes me think this resistance to pointing out the self-interest bit is because some part of me just wants me and all my white buddies to self-flagellate all day long and be relentlessly driven solely from a want to do good and right wrongs and try to make up for atrocities rather than this evil, evil selfishness of also getting a benefit from working towards an anti-racist world.

And then I come back to why the hell am I being so either/or? Partly, I know, is a state of my own personal psyche, which is for my own personal lj. But also because I think that our racialized system indoctrinates these myths of contention and competition, to keep ideas and people and strategies safely locked away in their respective barns and barred from intercommunication. I, as a person, feel like I'm engaging in this work because I want to do what's right, and also because I feel like I would also benefit from a world where I wasn't caught up in my supremacy/privilege, and I don't have these crazy crises of conscience of holding both of these motivations, plus who knows how many more, all at once. It's just once I have to open my mouth and explain to other people that I freak out. So maybe I just need to step back into my person and go from there?

Just came across this quote from fatfu:

“I’m allowed to hate you unless you live your life to my exact specification - and if you do I still won’t believe you unless you look exactly how I want you to. I will call this 'concern for your health.'”

Yes.

I guess this is what I get for trying to avoid peeing a line in the sand:

http://community.livejournal.com/fatshionista/2631006.html?thread=54611550#t54611550

I admit it--I'm totally butthurt. But, it totally caught me off guard to get shit from those two. I mean, it's one thing to catch snark from people I'm EXPECTING snark from (i.e. unfatshionista members), it's a totally different feeling to catch it from people I'm NOT expecting it from. I mean, I fully and freely recognize that I have thin skin. So, I prepare myself when I expect it, but I get hurt (butthurt, ha!) when I don't expect it.

Lesson: if you're expecting snark, don't try to deflect it, because you'll just get barbs from places you weren't expecting them from.

Also, I find it weird that such unfats-haters would be so snarky. I guess they'd argue that they're doing it to my face.

And, in hindsight, I totally wish I would have put the brakes on and THOUGHT a little more about my comments, because it's totally clear that I DID pee a line in the sand, which was what I was trying to avoid in the first place. (However, as paralleled in the above lesson, being neutral doesn't mean much except that EVERYONE is against you.) I just wanted them to stop being mean to me!!!!

ETA: Guh. This was all just such a dumb idea.

I need to sell some clothes on fatshionista. I held on to my Fashion Overdose stuff way too long, and that stuff is expensive. Plus the stupid Right Fit jeans that I bought that look fug on me. (Well, two of the three pair I bought look fine, the third is awful, and I still don't know what possessed me to get it.)

When oppressions are systemic and institutional, everything is connected.
Alternately, when we restore our view of ourselves as ecological, natural, physical beings, everything is connected.

Michael Pollan again has it right:
( Food Politics = Fat Politics = Class Politics = Environmental Politics = Immigration Politics = ... )

This fatshionista post really got my mind churning, for a few days now. It's a new idea that I hadn't encountered yet, and like all ideas, it's making its way into being woven into my worldview.

( Cut )

My biology IS me, no matter the message sent. My body is NOT something to be transcended or escaped from, whether or not it's fat. Food will NOT hold me hostage--it's the industry behind the calorie that wants to constrict me, that wants to obviate lifegiving nourishment into packets and pills. My food IS me.

I can't and won't invalidate the experience of others, though. I only hope that this can serve like some kind of food/biology positivity.

That's all I've got right now.

Date:	2007-03-21 17:48
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	okay

I have a feeling that people think I'm sketchy because I don't update my journal. I guess I don't really care. I post/comment fairly regularly in fatshionista. Like I say in my profile, I only joined lj years ago because my sister used to use it, and at the time she was a trainhopping hitchhiking punk. Still is, to some extent. I happened to find fatshionista through some weird turn of googling, and since I had an lj account already, I figured I'd just use the one I have.

I am interested in joining other fun/thought-provoking communities. If you have any questions, comment to this entry and I'll get back to you.

And yeah, I had six entries from 2003 that I deleted because they were worthless. I think that's an lj faux pas, but I'm not sure.