From the Trenches

Sometimes (well a lot) lately, I ask myself, “How come I'm not writing?” I stare at the screen and do actually wonder that. It’s not that I’m not thinking about things that I possibly could write about, it’s just that it seems like the things on my mind would take too long to write about, or be too involved to try to explain in a blog post. Things like why I’m frustrated with all the talk (again) about race. I wonder if there’s an algorithm to topics that tend to trend in the news.

 It does take me back to my younger self, who simply just fell in love with someone with beautiful brown eyes, and beautiful brown skin. We can make it more than that, a statement of bravery, or of social activism, but really, it wasn’t more than that. It seemed like more than that, when people asked stupid shit like, “What about the kids?” Before I even had kids. It seemed like more than that when people would look at us together for too long a time, but really, it wasn’t. 

Not that we shouldn't talk about things, about stuff, but that I’ve been in so many ‘talks’ about ‘difficult’ topics that never really seemed to go anywhere, or I end up trying to give my perspective, as a white person living in a white culture, in a non-white family, and this, like the stories I want to tell, seems to be too long and winding a story to tell.

I'm also thinking about poverty and prosperity, and how we want to pull people up out of poverty, but not too much, not too far, not into prosperity, because then they might just somehow end up one of the 1% and then that, we know would be bad, very bad. We have weird ideas about money in our culture, and I don't want to think those weird ideas anymore. I just want to make money and pay off my student loan debt, so I don't have to think about that anymore either. Or if I do think about it, it's with gratitude for opportunity. I don’t want to rail against the system of education that figured out a way to get guaranteed money and put us all in debt. I really don’t. 

That comes too close for comfort to where I was; working at a Catholic university where hindsight affords me some clarity and hilarity at that world. I see so clearly the hierarchy, the way pay correlated (mostly) with advancement of degrees, unless of course you were part of the clergy, and if not part of the clergy, part of the belief system of the good patron saint. So, here I go, into anger and resentment, what I’ve been trying to avoid for the most part, at the hypocrisy of gentle folk. Maybe I can shift it into just sadness and disillusionment, there, that feels better. 

Sort of. I have more stories to tell, but I’m just coasting a bit now. Megan is having free rein to buy and cook whatever she wants and I’m eating like a queen. She makes granola whenever we run out! How amazing is that? I’ve found that I can shop at Nordstrom’s Rack online!!! Again, how cool is it to get new clothes in the mail at a fraction of the cost to pay to fight my way to Mall of America on a Sunday afternoon? I don’t have to experience that creepy “the building is swaying” feeling, nor worry about terrorist attacks to dress well. The world is turning out to be more than ok, I think. And I might just be able to leave the past alone, one day.