lighten up kate

So....I think I'll post something happier because my last post was a big downer.

some funny family stuff:

On Christmas day my brother and I were talking about lions (for some random reason). All of a sudden out of nowhere my grandmother looks off into the distance very seriously and says

"I wonder if bigfoot is real"

AHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA

Today my mother and I picked my sister up from a friends house. The kids were being obnoxious as usual and my sister kept calling them assholes. My mother proceeds to say:

"Stop calling them assholes! You know, that's a very important body part!"

We laughed hysterically for about a minute

She then replied with

"You try living without one!!!"

speaking of assholes....

Later that night I was relaying this story to someone who wishes to remain anonymous and right after the 'asshole' portion of the story he laughed so hard that he sharted on my living room couch.

I'm not here this isn't happening

I am of no consequence here anymore. I float in on a cloud, with memories of past erasures erased, expecting the same embrace from 5 years ago. I am an idea, a rumor, a pretty face, a funny joke, a story from that one time.

Where am I?

I had a drink with my good friend from highschool and told her that most of my friends in SF have known me for less than a year. She was absolutely blown away by this and told me she has known all her friends for at least 8 years.

Where are my roots?

I have been away from here for so long that I can't swoop in and expect to blend in with the scenery anymore. I just get snippits of lives, pieces of pictures, a summary of a year, a story from that one time.

I pretend to know people. They pretend to know me. They miss the me I used to be.

I wondered how she could have forgotten me, and then I remembered that I am a novelty, someone completely removed from her everyday thoughts. She doesn't even return my calls. She never returns anyone's calls.

I feel like I'm floating on air, but not in the elated, dreamlike way in which people describe. I feel like my feet are inches from the floor and I can't shake that falling feeling. This is no longer my home in any respect, and I am barely settled into my new apartment in the city. I desperately crave stability but feel that is it far from my reach. I should be used to it, but as a Taurus, it's hard to float.

on the white suburban family

In a poem I wrote a while back I wrote:

The nuclear family is bullshit

It shouldn't exist

Mothers have to watch Oprah 

to understand their kids,

pop pills to deal with

how much their children hate them

Why is it commonplace for teenagers to suddenly loathe their parents? What is it about our society that encourages children to cut the umbilical chord with their teeth and spit it out with words of fire? It is the ingrained sadistic, neoliberal, capitalist society that teaches us we must cut our ties, sever our roots, in order to start a volatile bubble of our own. 

As I discussed in my last post, once children reach teenage years, their bubble bursts. Though many children are exposed to the harsh realities of life very early on, I would argue that typically white, middle to upper class, suburban children are shielded as much as possible from reality. Their existence is a construction, their poisons of society are concealed. Once a teenager, their is a sudden realization that they cannot be an astronaut or a superhero or a princess just because 'you can do anything if you put your mind to it'.

LIES. 

Maybe that is why so many teenagers are depressed. Their dreams are shattered with no warning. Their parents cannot protect them from any and everything, but rather are the one's who lied to them throughout their entire childhood. 

How do we protect our children without being liars? 

The nuclear family discourages community. How many people in suburbia actually know their neighbors? If there was a major disaster, could they rely on their neighbors for support and care? It is no wonder suburban teenager are depressed and empty inside, they were only raised by two people (or one). They say it takes a village to raise a child. I believe this to be true. No two people can give a child all the love and lessons they need. When parents get stressed out and have problems of their own, the child must watch and cope, for there is no one else to comfort them.

The nuclear family traps people, and creates a problematic power relationship and unequal division of labor. There is a dichotomy between the public and private sphere, no matter where the value is placed. What is more important work? your middle management accounting job or your wife's domestic labor? Perhaps the man stays home and does the housework and cares for children  and the woman works a full-time job, there is still a value judgement placed on the labor, and an unspoken scrutiny about the 'switched' gender roles. The roles are still in place, they are simply reversed. 

Oh I know! Let's solve the problem by hiring  a Mexican immigrant to clean our house and watch our child for cheap! Then we can both work, make plenty of money, and have an equal power relationship! that solves everything, right?

Wrong. Even if the woman is not undocumented, perhaps she is a 'legal' Mexican American woman or an African American woman, their still an extreme power imbalance. How is it that the only way to create gender equality within a nuclear family is to exploit a woman of color? It is incredibly rare to see a white upper middleclass family with a white nanny.

This is the product of capitalism. Capitalism thrives on exploitation and it must be reproduced in the family structure in order for it to survive. If exploitation is reduced within the family, it must be outsourced to another person; an already exploited woman. 

The community should raise everyone's children. Why can't neighbors watch each other's children for free when they aren't busy? Break down those white picket cages and open your arms to your community! There is no community in white suburbia. Everyone lives for their own little bubble family and good riddance to everyone else. We must combat this and show children they will always have someone to care for them, that their care does not depend on race and class privilege. 

Everyone deserves a big, loving family with a myriad of personalities and lessons to share. Why not leave your front door open more often? 

on children

I wanted to post a piece I published in my collaborative book "Diamond Tumbleweeds" with Stellar Cassidy. Hopefully you will all be able to read the book really soon. This piece is a social commentary about the treatment of children and my vision for how thing should be instead. 

Childhood

I’ve been thinking a lot about childhood lately. How our society only sees them as adorable accessories. We condescend them and fail to appreciate them for their incredible gifts and love them for how cute and simple they are. Children are only “simple” in their lack of concrete knowledge of our manufactured, poisonous ideas. But even though they lack the words to qualify these ideas, they are not blind to them.

 

            Their brains are like sponges that are constantly learning, changing, and imitating. What they lack in words and conceptual knowledge, they thrive with feeling, emotion, and instinct. Ingrained in their tiny bodies is the innate desire to eat, breathe, scream, love, and be loved. Why is it that the older we get, the less in touch we are with these basic life functions? Children know nothing of greed, cruelty, self-consciousness, or anxiety. They know themselves as a being that must survive, stay warm, dry and safe.

 

            I wonder if children have mental powers that we don’t understand. It seems like they can always see through bullshit and tell if someone is truly genuine. I find that sometimes I will smile at a baby and think “you’re incredible and beautiful” and they will smile like they heard me. They are so brilliant and perceptive and are never afraid to tell the truth. Young children don’t know lies, but unfortunately they believe the ones we tell them. Their little minds are squishy, colorful playdough, constructing their own worlds.

            We paint the world in rainbows, unicorns, and fantasy. They run through mud, spin in circles, sing, spit, shout, and we think it’s adorable. How does it feel when all of a sudden they are told to keep it down, slow down, calm down. Why is silly seen as immature? We thrive to create a beautiful, fanciful world for our children. I want to know why that world has to disappear, why we have to go through the trauma of realizing that the world is not perfect, but very cruel.

   Perhaps the world would be less cruel is we learned from children. We idolize adults for their great feats in music, movies, and politics, but why don’t we glorify the child who created a magical forest out of stuffed animals, tree branches, blankets and facepaint.? Why do we idolize van gogh instead of the boy who drew a dinosaur on his wall with his mother’s lipstick and mud?

 Creativity should never be discouraged in a young child because it is the time they are learning the most. That lipstick was probably expensive and tested on animals, there’s more than enough mud, and I’m sure you weren’t going to do anything with that wall anyway. Let your son go nuts! You’re probably afraid that hell grow up to be a graffiti artist, right? Well the streets need more decorating, more words, more tales from the silenced. 

Patrick

couples MAY be counterrevolutionary

however....

after spending the afternoon with a compassionate, intelligent, down to earth, feminist, radical, insightful, attractive, quirky, sensitive, funny man from Massachusetts....

I find myself sad to sleep alone for the first time in years.

perhaps this is a positive development, perhaps this is a sign I am expanding


but it doesn't feel like it because I already miss him and feel like my heart is sort of closing.

intensity

Why do people hide from intensity like it is going to ruin their new sweater?

Am I harshing your mellow? I'm sorry that I am not satisfied by talking about the newest band or the best kind of beer or what celeb is fucking whom.

I want to talk about real shit. My poetry is one of the only ways for me to hang myself on a clothesline and let people watch me dry. I am saturated with intensity, a concentrated mass of color that makes eyes bleed with beauty.

NEWS FLASH! We live in a fucked up world. I want to talk about it. I want to describe how my heart falls out of my chest whenever I see war on television. I want to pour my sensitivity all over people to relieve their dry hearts from starvation. Where is the outrage? where is the empathy?

Yesterday I put my hand on my sister's shoulder while she was crying and I felt her pain transfer into me through my hand. I have the ability to put myself inside other's hearts and sometimes it makes me crumble. I am resiliant and brave but when I have my hand on the world's shoulder, it is too much to bear.

People say I am intense. A euphemism for 'too much' 'too emotional' too serious' tootootootootoo

I hope to be enough. Enough for me, enough for those who see the power in my intensity. Sometimes I feel power flowing through me that feels like magic mixed with madness.

We cannot beat this system until we step up the intensity. Until we get so angry we feel like our veins will burst from our necks and break our cages with loud, raw, INTENSE words. I want to feel freedom explode from my pours and show everyone there is more than the status quo.

I think a revolutionary must have a degree of intensity, or she will fade into the collage of pastel shades.

3 pages a day or bust

Hopefully I can make this blog look spiffy soon, but I'm too lazy....

Anyway, I have vowed to myself to write 3 pages in my notebook a day. So far I have been quite successful and even inspired a friend to do the same (E!!!). Here's a lil something I poured out last night:

Familiar

I crave open windows
so everyone in the road
can watch me change from robe
to clothes
I want my skin to be your eyelid

Taste the sweat from my pores
treat it as yours
don't wince at the bitter after taste
I know taste like a bad memory
but if you dig in your psyche
you taste pretty salty too

I have lived inside walls
so familiar
they felt like home
The chairs upholstered in soft, thick skin
stuffed with feathers of plucked chickens
I was most alive when I choked on their bones
felt the air robbed from my lungs
and realized I might die alone

Once I poked a hole
in my airway
and found that air did not ease
my starving throat
So I sucked the marrow
and dreamed of fingers soothing my soul

Fingers that scratch paint
from windows
I feel light on my face
I remember I have freckles
and love when lips grace
my collarbone

I taste my sweat

it doesn't stings my tongue anymore.

new year, new blog!

Hello ravenous readers,

I have not had a blog since high school and do we really want to think about live journal? I don't.

This is my effort to be more open, less guarded and cautious about the way I display myself. Ideally, this keyboard would not have a backspace and once I type it, BAM, its done.

Maybe I should try that.....

no, definitely not ready, but I want to get there.

I want to give people a window into myself while I am actively developing what they watch

These first posts may be short because I have already used the delete button about a hundred times.

Hopefully I can eventually remove it from my keyboard and you can enjoy love, unharnessed words (kind of funny, I accidently wrote 'love' instead of 'long', not deleting it :)