Malleable Empathy

Being an aunt comes with many lessons. Babies have a way of reminding us of our foundations in life, our true necessities. They also come with a lot of responsibilities and ‘growing pains.’ Right now Taft is teething which, for anyone who hasn’t been around infants, is the worst. They won’t eat, sleep, or stop crying because their little gums are so sore.

I personally can’t remember what it feels like to have teeth ripping through my gums, but I imagine it is fairly painful. For those of us taking care, it is difficult to respect the infant’s valid experience when they are wailing and inconsolable. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, “Yep Taffy, teething hurts but life doesn’t get any easier— better saddle up.” And this diminution of experience isn’t helpful for anyone.

I remember my mom once sitting on the floor with me in our living room on a particularly dramatic night. I was very depressed and on the verge of suicide. She came downstairs and tried to talk to me.

“I was a teenager once too, you know,” she consoled me, “I remember what it’s like.”

And yet I felt so alone—like she could never understand what I was going through. I am coming to recognize how feeling with people is very different than relating to them—it’s a matter of empathy. As adults, we have a tendency to diminish woes of those in different ages and stages of psychosocial development with a ‘just you wait till blank’ response, rendering the person’s current issues in this time and space trivial. Even with ourselves, how often do we discount our feelings by drowning them in labels of how we 'should' be instead of how we are.

Sometimes when I stay at the Mirai, I go down to the workshop and watch Ryan wire trees. Hunched on a stool with house music soaring in the background, Ryan has conversations with his hands. He radically bends, bruises, grafts, chops, redirects the flow—all to create a foundation for exceptional growth. The trees respond. 

             “Have you ever broken a tree?” I asked him once as he was precariously bending a deadwood limb past what looked like its tipping point.

            “Absolutely,” He smiled without pausing his copper choreography, “but I have also made some pretty fuckin awesome trees.” He took a step back as the pine’s branches settled in their new contorted harmony. “If I don’t go all out, these trees would never be worthwhile. You’d be amazed at how far they can be pushed.”

I continually am in awe of the malleability of wood—such a rigid medium in my perception. Similarly with the development of the self, our current state often feels rigid--weighed down by conditions of our past or future. 

It is easy to forget that our personal wiring happens one day at a time. We can’t judge other people’s experiences or struggles as invalid, or even our own, because every moment we are in is very real. All of our growing pains contribute to the integration of a whole self-- all are valid and worthy of respect. Empathy is a tool for radical personal and communal transformation. We all agree that it takes heartbreaks, teething, new environments, grafting roots, better fuel, vitamin D, and uncomfortable, radical contortion to make ‘fuckin awesome’ humans--so we should be a little nicer to each other and ourselves on the way. 

Reset Button

 
          

There is this thing we used to do with Taft a month or so ago. When he was wailing super hard and nothing would console him, we would blow into his face. He would get so startled by the gust that he would essentially forget why he was so upset in the first place. It was our special reset button—almost like knocking the wind out of him so that he came back to earth from whatever infant-spiral he was on.

Sometimes I feel like I need to do the same thing—to just hit the reset button on myself; regain my center with some fresh air; remember all the people around me who are pushing for my growth and happiness; appreciate the love and let life rock me back to sleep.

Keep Portland Weird

• ·      If you resemble any character from reality bites, especially Ethan Hawk, you’re nailing it (androgyny is in). 
• ·      If you don’t have compost in which you use chicken shit from your very own free-range flock, you are a worthless human being—living in an apartment is no excuse, petition for a communal chicken coop in the complex.
• ·      If you didn’t buy your entire outfit from a vintage shop or from good will, you are capitalist degenerate (everyone in urban outfitters perusing the sale bins has a hood and Jackie-O glasses on out of shame, unless they go to PSU in which case they should pursue work as real-life urban-outfitters mannequins)
• ·      Somehow you are supposed to be super into veganism while also well-versed in the plethora of tasty meat products Portland has to offer—Im still trying to figure out this contradiction.
• ·      People don’t read fiction here— they only read the Kurt Vonnegut, Malcolm Gladwell, or The New Yorker. That’s it.
• ·      Only tourists like voodoo doughnuts
• ·      You’ve gotta have some sort of creative endeavor happening to get respect. Sure, most 20-somethings are plugging away as servers or baristas, but they are all gushing at the spit to tell you about their side-projects—a kombucha startup, their pottery, freelance illustration, ultra-running, yoga-teaching, dream-catcher weaving, good lord don’t get me started on the bands, oh the bands.
• ·      On that note, if you live here and you don’t play a musical instrument, you better have a damn good reason why not.
• ·      According to my ‘what is sexy’ barometer, if PDX could vote for sexiest man alive, it would hands down be Devendra Banhart. From what I can tell, he is the epitome of what men and women find attractive here. As for the ladies category, still searching.
• ·      This is the only city in which rain-gear can be sheek.
• ·      If you live downtown, you’re an asshole. Come to the eastside and relax a little.
• ·      When the sun is out, having conversations about the sun being out never gets old.
• ·      People judge you by your loyalty to local coffee roasters…….and IPAs.
• ·      Don’t ever play dubstep here. Just don’t. Portland took a far away look at the debauchery happening in Colorado a few years ago, and said no thanks we’ll stick to indie-rock.
• ·      If you don’t ride your fixie to work, you better be taking an alternative form of public transportation you selfish gas-guzzling-sonofabitch.
• ·      I figure it a nod to portland’s heritage that flannel and beards will never be out of style in stumptown.
• ·      Oh my, the beards! The oliver peoples style glasses! The sheek-grunginess! Portland looks like a Wes Anderson movie, with way more tattoos. And yes that is the best compliment any Portlander could ever hear about their city. 

Ima keep exploring this eclectic town and will update with more cunning idiosyncrasies later.

Lit

Now I see—it was just a spark.

I wonder if it ever felt different to you,

Or was I just another crumpled newspaper

Fed to the flames?

I thought we stoked it together, with secrets.

But now I see the beguiling—wit and whisky.

I can’t help but question my own light.

Was it always my choice?

It is difficult to see

The choice in a scheme. Were all conartists

Licking charred wounds—there’s no foresight

When we hardly see ourselves.

Yet I am no longer willing

To get involved with men who are content

With painting me a question mark in ash.

Now I see—matches are plentiful and easily lit.

Normal Dissonance

The best way to describe my generation is angst-ridden. We feel as though we are at the precipice of a cultural revolution, but can’t pinpoint the method for instigating such a change.  

Many of us spent our college days studying the depth of institutional corruption, impunity, and the general sustainability-crisis. By day, we sat in desks, Macs at attention, saluting grassroots campaigns, fair-trade, ‘glocal’ movements, and cursing the corporatocracy. By night, we argued about ethics over micro-craft brews, all in consensus that change was in order, feeling fulfilled that we were contributing to that shift in our status as students producing work.

In an ever-capitalistic flair, our culture equates production with worthiness; the more you produce, the more worthy a member of society you are. In college you exist in a in a verbal matrix where written and spoken word carry the weight of ‘progress.’ When you get an ‘A’ for your sustainability proposal or extra credit for your reproductive rights campaign, this is positive feedback that you are ‘okay,’ you are worthy, you have produced something in line with your values. As students, our production beast is fed with the institutional stamps of approval.

The thing is, once you leave college, lip-service no longer pays. And we are tasked with carving a unique niche in which we can provide for ourselves while also (ideally) contributing to the type of society we so vehemently advocated for in the classroom. Sadly, our education system arms us abundantly with an abstract knowledge of the current problems at hand, but leaves us high and dry when it comes to actualizing a life that counteracts those issues. Our generation has been given the precious gift of awareness and the curse of bushwacking new routes for change.  

The feeling I get is that we are all overwhelmed. Psychologically, it makes sense that we would throw up our hands, get a job serving or a 9-5 in a corporation, while continuing to pay homage to our ideals with literature and newspaper articles. This is comfortable.

In essence, this is what we have been doing our whole lives—talking about the necessity of change without follow-through.

Hey, we all gotta pay the bills and it’s no doubt a relief to have all of your I’s dotted and T’s crossed when it comes to explaining your ‘plans’ to the  people at large. The pressure of expectation builds the mental infrastructure for feverish hamster-wheel spirals—going through the motions to bite the cheddar because it’s just ‘what you do.’

 This cultural script of externally placed worthiness is deeply embedded in us. Even if we don’t agree or recognize the irrationality in it, we can’t help but be influenced by the cognitive grooves of social perception. When we are not on a societally condoned path towards ‘success,’ it takes a conscious effort to not make choices from a place of fear and/or ambivalence. We have a culturally programmed fear of the unknown, of taking risks, of listening to our intuition even when the outcome may not be reasonable.

It seems that cognitive dissonance is as quotidian in adult life as mortgages, infidelity, and psychotropic medications. Such realizations could tempt any aware individual into the spiral of nihilism, but we must have hope, for these ‘normalities’ are the very reasons why we should seek to confront and rewrite the stories undergirding the tide of our time. 

Feminist Superheroes

Happy Sunday Everyone! Some powerladies to knock off your day right

Confessions of an Economic Hitman

  

            Today, men and women are going into Thailand, the Phillipines, Botswana, Bolivia, and every other country where they ope to find people desperate for work. They got to these places with the express purpose of exploiting wretched people--people whose children are severely malnourished, even starving, people who live in shanty-towns and have lost all hope of a better life, people who have ceased to even dream of another day. These men and women leave their plush offices in Manhattan or San Francisco or Chicago, streak across continents and oceans in luxurious jetliners, check into first-class hotels and dine at the finest restaurants the country has to offer. Then they go searching for desperate people.
             Today, we still have slave traders. They no longer find it necessary to march into the forests of Africa looking for prime specimens who will bring top dollar on the auction blocks in Charleston, Cartagena, and Havana. They simply recruit desperate people and build a factory to produce the jackets, blue jeans, tennis shoes, automobile parts, computer components, and thousands of other items they can sell in the markets of their choosing. Or they may elect not even to own the factory themselves; instead, they hire a local businessman to do all their dirty work for them.
            These men and women think of themselves as upright. They return to their homes with photographs of quaint sites and ancient ruins, to show to their children. They attend seminars where they pat each other on the back and exchange tidbits of advice about dealing with the eccentricities of customs in far-off lands. Their bosses hire lawyers who assure them that what they are doing is perfectly legal. They have a cadre of psychotherapists and other human resource experts at their disposal to convince them that they are helping those desperate people.
           The old-fashioned slave trader told himself that he was dealing with a species that was not entirely human, and that he was offering them the opportunity to become Christianized. He also understood that slaves were fundamental to the survival of his own society, that they were the foundation of his economy. The modern slave trader assures himself (or herself) that the desperate people are better off earning one dollar a day than no dollars at all, and that they are receiving the opportunity to become integrated into the larger world community. She also understands that these desperate people are fundamental to the survival of her company, that they are the foundation for her own lifestyle. She never stops to think about the larger implications of what she, her lifestyle, and the economic system behind them are doing to the world--or of how they may ultimately impact her children's future.

----From Confessions of an Economic Hitman--John Perkins pg 180-181

This book gives an inside look into the vast corporate empire running the globe. I highly recommend it for a better understanding of America's role in globalized business.