Bixi was a Hunter

new life

I’ve been “single” for about five days now, and every now and then, a few times a day, I look around and take status reports of myself. How are you doing, old self, I ask – feeling lonely? Independent? Contemplative? The readings come back blurry. In general, I just feel tentative – not feeling any one way overwhelmingly so. This is probably because Jen’s coming back from Europe in three weeks. But this summer is ushering in a new era, unmistakably, with or without me.

Loving and Loathing My Inner Salad Spinner

Oh, but what a clamor you have created!

Ha.

I’ve got another one for you anyway.

I’ve recently become preoccupied with lettuce. Pre-washed, bagged lettuce, to be precise. No need for a salad spinner, or even a knife. Washing lettuce has long been my least favorite kitchen activity, so I’m incredibly happy to give it up. Happy, happy, happy I am, deriving true delight from the simplicity, the ease of bagged, cold-water-washed lettuce.

Then, however, I pick up an Adbusters, and self-doubt coalesces into small bubbles in my bloodstream. A few flips of the page, and it’s clear I’m just a pawn of the bagged lettuce industry. They spy on me late at night with red-eye goggles. They watch me leaning on the kitchen counter, shoulders swaying under the weight of the working girl’s cares. They see me faltering in the face of the complexity of the salad spinner, too tired, giving up. They stalk me to the grocery store the following week, where I stall at the hefty price tag of prewashed lettuce, then remember my late-night exhaustion, and throw the lettuce into my cart. They know me so well! They know how to make my bland heart beat with a neat, small pleasure – efficient lunch preparation. I feel delighted when it’s achieved. But lo, I am not delighted. I am not. I’ve merely been played by agribusiness turned lifestyle product company! When I am happy it is merely an illusion. I am not happy.

Adbusters generally makes me sick to my stomach; the tone is just a constant level of sarcasm I can’t muster, and I can’t really get on board with the whole ironic twisting of images thing. If the problem is the overabundance of branded logos, then how does reproducing them yet again, with a subtle, mocking twist, contribute to their destabilization? I’m ready to go on the record saying that the human mind is not that quick, or that sophisticated. The subtle mocking twist is only noticed way too late, long after the nearly palpable mapping of the graphic onto the well-worn grooves of the mind, grooves that are just waiting for the image to fall softly and neatly into their mold. (It’s kind of like drag…but that’s for another day.)

That was a brief detour. I think the problem with Adbusters and political orientations of similar ilk is that they maintain that we can’t have fun, can’t win, can’t trust our own emotions and desires until the revolution comes. Such an approach does not believe that change and authenticity can happen this very minute, in this very space.

Yesterday I read a statement on the Sylvia Rivera Law Project website that struck me pleasantly, and it is relevant. In a section explaining why they operate as a collective, they write, “We believe that in the struggle for social justice too often change is perceived as a product and not a process. We seek to use a non-hierarchical structure to support work that aims to redistribute power and wealth for a more just society.” For them, it’s not worth having a more common or efficient management structure to hasten liberation day. Instead, small pieces of liberation can happen right now, because SRLP is already structured the way it would be at the post-revolutionary sunset. It’s a process. Even with their conditioned, automatonic brains, some of it can happen every day, as they go along, instead of in one big fell swoop at the very end.

So I don’t need to beat myself up about buying bagged lettuce. I can trust myself to make okay decisions based on authentic feelings, here and now, even with my own conditioned, automatonic brain.

(Do you think SRLP would be angered to hear me co-opt their mission statement to get myself off the hook about bagged lettuce?)

Maybe, actually, bagged lettuce is just the smallest part of life, and I’m the least obvious, and most free, when against all good reason my roommates and I start making our most ambitious of dinners at 10pm, hauling out not only the salad spinner but the blender and the garlic press and mortar and pestle, playing music loudly and talking and talking, just because we like to eat together.

Feminist Urban Rebounding

In late August, before we moved to Jay Street, Beccah and I made a habit of wandering around our soon-to-be new neighborhood late on Sunday afternoons. Invariably, we’d end up at Vicky and Jess’s house right around dinnertime, and, invariably, they would have just finished cooking a three-course meal, and would invite us to eat with them. It was a good system, even if an entirely – I promise – subconscious one. We repeatedly made the mistake of wandering around Cambridgeport proper instead of the neighborhood that surrounded our future home, which is really Riverside, and is quite a bit shabbier than tree-lined, brightly-painted Cambridgeport – but nonetheless, our walks definitely sparked a love affair with Central Square that persists to this day.

One particular afternoon, the sun was baking the brick sidewalks, and at least one of us was wearing Beccah’s legendary Calvin Klein denim miniskirt. Our meandering took us past the Cambridge Women’s Center on Pleasant Street. We stopped outside the Women’s Center, of course, and paused to contemplate the building, glowing as it was in the languid summer sun. The painted signs that advertised its services – “housing resources,” “job listings,” etc. – filled us with sadness and nostalgia. The gorgeous, three-story building, and the bending trees in the yard along the side of the house, seemed hulking and unwieldy against the signs advertising services so much better suited, nowadays, to flat instantaneousness of the always-unsatisfying computer screen.

In Cambridge, as people who went to Harvard remember all too well, possessing physical space always means more than you think it might mean. Because land is a zero-sum commodity, its possession confers a sense of destiny, chosenness, on the possessor. You feel like landed gentry if you’ve got it. It’s stressful, in a way, just walking around, because every spare patch of scraggly grass could be used for nobler purposes and you have to think about that all the time. I was always afraid – I think many of us were – that if we actually got a Women’s Center at Harvard, we’d immediately be accused of not utilizing the space to its maximum potential, of serving too few people to justify our dominion over something as grand as the basement of a freshman dorm. And so it is with the Cambridge Women’s Center. “Justify yourself!” we reflexively think. We can get almost of all of what we need through the ubiquitous, undulating waves of wireless internet. What do we need you for anymore?
___________________

So during the winter I go to this gym often; I’ve mentioned it tangentially here quite a bit. It’s an all-women affair, and many things about the gym make me want to blog – the atmosphere of grim, unsmiling competition for scarce resources (elliptical machines, yoga mats, square feet on the exercise room floor); the hyper-perky, hyper-blonde card-swipers, whom I generally like; occasional dyke-spottings, etc. Both this year and last year I’ve known quite a few people who go to the gym, too, and since I go on a very predictable schedule, I almost never go to Healthworks without seeing someone I know. During the winter the gym is a bizarrely large presence in my life – I’m there almost every day, and a sizable percentage of the human interaction and visual field stimulus I experience each day happens there.

So, why doesn’t Healthworks become a women’s center? In fact, why doesn’t it become the Cambridge Women’s Center? It’s not inconceivable, right? Put aside for a second the skeptical part of yourself that says, “But exercise is just a patriarchal plot to make women lose weight and disappear.” Any institution, in possession of a building erected out of bricks and mortar, charging fees and requiring its members to get out of their houses and go somewhere, that also turns a profit, can only be admired. We all gather, in a manner of speaking, for two hours, nearly every day, in an age in which humans are singularly difficult to motivate to take part in civic and political life. Surely that presence can be harnessed for something beyond slimming down.

Healthworks already makes a few good-hearted stabs at being more of a community center than just a gym. There are several opportunities for the imprimatur of its members, and there could be more – there are colorful bulletin boards, with some space dedicated to volunteer opportunities and benefit marathons; members are encouraged to donate magazines of their choosing to the gym; some classes are open to community members, not just paying members. Of course, just about a million things would have to change for Healthworks to become a women’s center – a feminist women’s center, that is. First of all, I really can’t deny that Healthworks profits from and is spawn of the patriarchy; frankly, the gym’s success just proves how much time and effort women are willing to dedicate to conforming to patriarchal physical standards. The longer I think about it, the creepier it is. Somehow, we’d have to resolve that problem. Anyway, second of all, no more copies of Us Weekly or Cosmopolitan creeping out of every crevice like roaches. No more “Legally Blonde” playing on the movie channel. But – just imagine what we could have instead! NPR and Air America – whatever that is – piped into the locker room. “But I’m a Cheerleader” on the movie channel. I’d like it so much better. Duh. Whether these changes would have to be achieved by executive fiat, or whether we could have a looser, tipping-point approach that permitted Us Weekly but ensured a surfeit of Off Our Backs, could be figured out as we go along. We could have subcommittees that chose the weekly film rotation. All it requires is a little conscious application of thought, and it wouldn’t be so hard.

If only there were somewhere for us to go. But there hardly is anymore. If what we want it to get outside our dark little apartments, to pass our eyes over something pretty and unexpected, to run into someone we recognize, we had better be able to admit it, because most of the little tasks that might have drawn us out of the house, into the world, and accidentally into other people’s orbits, can be done perfectly alone. With no one to witness our small, proud undertakings, we may as well not be doing them at all.

If I Had Three Wishes

At Beccah’s direction, I just discovered the extraordinary Twisty Faster and her blog “I Blame the Patriarchy,” which is fucking amazing. Forget colloquial or whatever else I said I would endeavor to become – I wish to be like her, totally outlandish, often crazy, frequently wrong, but altogether indispensable. (For extra benefit, read her after you’ve read a few of Judith Warner’s guest columns on nytimes.com. Twisty makes for good detox.) And I don’t wish to rain on Twisty’s parade in any respect. But do you think she’s maybe having a little too much fun?

Too much fun? Too much fun? How could anyone blaming the patriarchy be having fun? This is serious business; as Maureen Dowd is only too keen to remind us, blaming the patriarchy is grim, unpleasant work requiring constant vigilance; the rewards are few.

Well, I humbly submit to your consideration the fact that Twisty does seem to be having a fairly good time. In fact I think Twisty herself would agree to this. Here are the indicators: one, she’s a rip-roaring writer, and turning out fine-tuned sentences even half as nice as hers give the body a warm, orgasmic glow; two, she has a coterie of adoring fans; three, some of her fans seem to have their own sites which, while not quite as brilliant as Twisty’s, nonetheless constitute some kind of online community; four, people seem to consult her for advice; five, she is a spinster aunt, and what’s not fun about that.

Okay, fine, so Twisty’s having fun, what’s wrong with that? Nothing, nothing, geez…it’s just that this patriarchy-blaming is so much fun I’m not sure what I’d do if there stopped being a patriarchy to blame. It’s kind of like how I feel at birthday parties: I like it better when it’s someone else’s party. It’s easier to be a critic, or a guest, lurking on the sidelines with the other sarcastic, disaffected partygoers and only occasionally pipe up. It’s not only that I don’t want to take the "stupor-in-a-serum" that Maddy warns against, it’s that I’m not sure I like the idea of the other alternative: liberation? Maddy writes,

[W]e need not a stupefier but its opposite: a substance that heightens angst and sensitivity to the experiences of others, and cultivates a fluctuating sense of one’s own relation to reality. After a dose of this serum, men as such would disappear, just as women have, and then the conversation would really begin. More uncertainty and less oblivion for all, gentlemen first.

But what on earth would that look like? Perhaps this is a failure of my imagination. Maybe it would be like Swarthmore, or Farm & Wilderness summer camp. Who knows? Maddy writes that we wouldn’t all think like final club members, feeling a lovely, untroubled oneness with the world. But in a post-patriarchy, presumably there would be nothing to be troubled about. Is this heaven? Or hell?

This is all, as Peter Gordon would say, highly speculative, because let’s face the dismantling of the patriarchy and associated evils is not going to happen any day now – but still. If we so desperately want our liberation, and the success of our civil rights movement and related struggles for visibility and a more accommodating dominant culture, should we perhaps gaze into the future a bit more insistently? Or, moreover, should we look with a closer eye at what draws us to our current affiliations so strongly, why we so much prefer to be outsiders and underdogs, why we like being critics so much?

Perhaps, in our (by which I mean the readers of Catgut whose identities are currently known to me) minority statuses, we’re all experiencing something I shall term oppression lite – enough to give our lives some color, but not to hinder our day-to-day lives or our aspirations seriously, not enough to draw insurmountable psychic limitations. Others may be experiencing oppression plus – the type that physically, materially interferes with the tasks of being human –  but we’ve got a milder, more existential strain. Do I really mean this? The fury, the fury, the roaring indignation with which I have approached my own particular axes of oppression should have taught me a thing or two, as should my own psyche, criss-crossed this way and that with shames and fears related to growing up female and being queer. But I would not want to give this up – not only because it is now synonymous with my own self but also because the experience has, at times, delivered me to extraordinary moments of redemption, moments of exquisite relief I would never have had had I never felt so alone and so alien in the first place.

What to do about this? Alison Bechdel has drawn some funny and deeply affecting cartoons on the do-we-want-what-we-fight-for theme, but none of them make any substantive conclusions beyond expressing relief that we’re not on the brink of success yet. It's rare to find Alison stumped, but this time it seems like she is. So am I. Maybe nostalgia is the only cure.

I’m listening to Lucinda Williams and eating the dinner I just made for myself. I call it “Spare Parts Fusion Surprise:” rice pilaf with kidney beans, green pepper, tomato, lentils, and tofu, slathered in a generous helping of Trader Joe’s curry simmer sauce. Any food that’s hot is really not too bad. Ahh, home cooking. Tamarind House, you’ve got nothing on me.

night thoughts

I woke suddenly this morning at four. Occasionally when I wake from sleep earlier than expected I feel as though I’ve slipped under a magnifying glass, and everything around me and in me looms and flickers, bigger and harsher than during the day. The music that I was playing over and over the day before (this time, Patty Griffin, “Long Road”) booms too loudly in my pink, naked ears, and when I remember what I said to other people throughout the day I am consumed by shame. At times like these I seem to have zipped into another skin, and everything that is usually usual seems foreign and impossible. Do I really live here, in this small life, with these friends, these people seemingly always around, these same walls, these patterns, these habits of mind? One aches to wander outside of the self, and in so doing, know the self, understand how it is one sees things, over and over, always the same. When I wake in the middle of the night I seem closer than ever to touching elsewhere – my mind, in my dreams, finds me other possibilities, other ways of being and relating that seem to float above the ruts I’ve carved. You can kiss across a river and, sometimes, finding wool socks for a girl to put over her cold hands is enough to prove you’re in love. There is no talking, and yet when the others in your life join you onstage, they know you in ways you didn’t realize you were unknown; your old, petty frustrations evaporate; there is a seamlessness between you.

When I wake so abruptly the coming day seems insurmountable. How will I get out of bed, how will I face the windy cold, how will I, will I ever, feel like I’m at the head of my life, not being dragged along across the water by a tattered ski rope flapping behind a speedboat. How will I make things different – in my self, with those around me. How will we talk about something new, how will we come to know a new part of one another.

Then I go back to sleep and by the time I’ve woken again I’ve stealed myself, and I’m ready for the day to begin.

 

The D Word and Its Discontents

Today I have for you a bona fide contribution to the “Not-for-Profit Blues” category. For I am (or was) very blue, and boy has no one yet profited.

All six people who ever read this blog have already been told this story in harrowing detail, so I will try to avoid rehashing it at length here, particularly because I can just hear the psychoanalyst-in-my-head clucking over how I just can’t stop compulsively retelling the same story over and over. (Do you, as I do, have an unabating fear of telling stories to the same person twice by mistake? Have I told you that fear already?)

So I participated in this dialogue series about race and ethnicity in Boston. It was simultaneously frustrating and cool; cool because the people who participated were really grown-ups, and they didn’t mind making you uncomfortable. There was little bullshit on the part of the participants. The facilitators would quote Gandhi at us, but the participants would make mincemeat of their pacifist leanings, try to stage a mutiny, and start aggressively facilitating each other. I lie in wait for personal transformation, and though it has not arrived yet, I’m glad I spent five weeks with those folks.

This dialogue series has been running for about two years in Boston, and my own particular dialogue group was the second to have a particular LGBT focus. As such, Lee, our Executive Director, had asked me to make a presentation about what I learned at the Dialogues at a staff meeting on Monday, to coincide nicely with the unveiling of our organization’s new “Diversity Plan.”

My presentation and the aftermath was a cosmic mess, but that’s not what I want to focus on, lest I fall into the trap of reliving and rehashing the experience, getting particularly indignant in all the same places all over again. The day involved crying in the stairwell, crying on the toilet, a feeling that I might soon break in half, and a powerful hit of missing home (which, at that point, felt like school). All this, and very little discussion about “the issues” – whether we’ll ever deal specifically with the legal issues people of color call our hotline about, what kind of messaging we will have around marriage, what it means for our organization that we now have $150 per plate fundraisers.

At the end of the day, the co-worker I’m taking a bike repair class with, Kate, invited me to dinner. She wrote me a nice email; she said she supported me 100%. I fell for it. We biked to Veggie Planet together. She had good things to say, she’s smart and I wish we could work with one another. But she spoke so loudly, so definitively, almost as if I had failed her. I felt like she used my spectacular, sky-streaking failure at the staff meeting as a springboard to hear herself make sophisticated critiques of GLAD; she refused, when I asked, to envision a GLAD that was making real and constructive strides on dealing with race and class issues. She doesn’t want to get her hands dirty. She remains unencumbered and above the fray; peering scornfully down at us mortals who make ill-fated and ill-considered stabs at dealing with the problem.

It all sounds familiar. “Queer theory, that’s what it does to you!” says Beccah. I felt Kate’s way, too, for quite awhile. My hands were spotless, my mind was pure. I hazarded no guesses; my mind a ruthlessly sharpened blade. I could cut through anything, and argue for nothing. In my mind, I started every sentence with “Well, politically speaking…,” or “Intellectually, I consider…”

***

A couple of weeks ago I was looking through the website of the Lesbian Avengers in Gainesville, Florida. Whether or not they’re still really active I can’t tell, but I love their website. In the “Policies & Analyses” section, they list “How to Be an Anti-Classist Ally” and “Inter-sex & Trans Demands.” The lists make plain the insufficiency of communication; they are lists of all the ways a non-trans, non-intersex, or non-poor person can never find mutuality with a trans, intersex, or poor person.

I am often angry and do not want to be quieted, and I understand that other people may be implacably angry and may not seek intersubjectivity with me. But I wonder – what counts as skepticism, suspicion, or reservation that can be grappled with and what counts as categorically racist, transphobic, or classist? What is both racist, transphobic, or classist and ought nonetheless to be grappled with? How racist, transphobic, or classist must a person be before we write him or her off? Ordinarily, I do not have a choice in the matter; in order to preserve my psychic integrity I flee a situation in which the movement toward intersubjectivity would be too taxing for me to sustain. But it gets murkier when I am arguing as an ally, on behalf of someone who is not me, where my survival is not at issue but someone else’s is. Who educates whom, who is responsible for providing education, who is beyond the pale, and when are we ever all on solid footing?

In our dialogue group one participant, a black gay man, left midway through one of our sessions. He said, “There are black gay men who need me downstairs, and I have to go do my job.” (He leads support groups.) I don’t know why he left, but I am guessing that he was not interested being patient with us as we fumbled toward proving to him that we weren’t racist beyond whatever measure is acceptable – or proved that we were, and submitted ourselves to his education.

Analysis, intersubjectivity, friendship – the cannibalizing of the psyche, the submitting of all parts of the psyche to the microscope, to cross-examination, to critique, to the freely flowing air, in which a thousand carefully guarded convictions that gird and underpin the embattled, bewildered psyche may wilt and cower – can be apolitical in the best case or anti-political in the worst; in an analysis, the relentless back-and-forth of transference and its spin-offs would have me analyzed and reduced to the point at which I, say, accepted without qualms my analyst’s cavernous mansion off Brattle Street. Politics operates the opposite way – we make rules and we stick to them; we refuse to entertain certain kinds of behavior; we write people off on the merest flicker of incompatibility with our unstated principles.

Over the weekend, the New York Times profiled Sarah Schulman, my idol in psychic integrity. Jesse Green writes that despite her “almost maternal warmth” he “still…found myself repeatedly preparing to flinch as she stalked me for bad motives, tired agendas and prejudices; when she thought she spied one she pounced as if to drag it from behind some trees and let it rot in the sun.” “She stalked you me for bad motives” – she doesn’t want his embrace, she doesn’t trust him for a second. Reporter and subject – so there’s no intersubjectivity; no big loss. But you and I, you and she – that loss seems much more significant.

Books with Teeth

On Sunday afternoon I organized my bookshelf. Last year, I didn’t organize my bookshelf until April, so I consider this a major improvement. My theory books are now organized chronologically and then by theme; my novels by geography and then chronology, and then I have two shelves that are so inconsistent I just organized them by size. I was pleased when I finished, but also quite sad. Organizing books brings me face-to-face with the pounds of reading I never did, and reminds me that I keep my four-inch-thick “Hegel” around just for show.

I’m haunted by a woman I met senior year at a reception after a Barker Center symposium. She had dark, short hair, seemed sullen and defensive. My thesis adviser, whom I was chatting with, recognized her; they had once both been students in the same graduate program, but my adviser was now in his tenth year of the program, and she had dropped out after two. She told him – and I can’t remember if she was ashamed or proud – that she had started selling off her theory books. Now, she was the managing editor for a “teeny tiny” cycling magazine. And, apparently, still coming to symposia at the Barker Center.

When will I start selling my theory books? I’ll always keep my copy of “Gender Trouble,” my copy of “History of Sexuality vol. 1,” of “A Course in General Linguistics.” But what about all the Frankfurt School stuff, stuff I waged a war on in my head, desperately trying to understand it and never quite finding traction? I pick up the books, shift them around, don’t want to open them again. A few sentences of Adorno, and I spiral back to my seat in class, my mind landlocked, not getting it and not knowing how to ask questions in the right language.

And it gets harder and harder for me to dismiss the thought that it’s all bullshit – the audaciously circuitous and arduous writing styles, the grandiose statements that, when reduced to common language, sounded like a Hallmark card, the theories that didn't seem to care or notice that they directly contradicted scientific reason. For example, I swear to god I was once in a class where the professor asserted that human cognition takes place in the heart, not the brain. (I won’t disclose her name as she’s quite famous – once she blurbed [for?] one of Judith Butler’s books.)

Last year I went through a period of about seven or eight months in which I was literally unable to keep my bedroom clean. It was a bizarre pathology. I’m still not quite sure what happened, but I think I suddenly realized that it just didn’t matter – no intrinsic logic held together the room’s cleanliness and my obligations to the world. If my clothes stayed on the floor for weeks, and I could still find them, that made for a system, and a dresser was irrelevant. If I never organized my bookshelf, who cared? I didn’t use my books anymore, wouldn’t reach for my Foucault every time I began a paper. There were no papers to begin. My books seemed like relics from a time I was ashamed of. Why keep them around?

Sometimes I feel like I'm tiptoeing around my possessions, acting as though they think their owner has turned into someone new and they don't quite like her yet.   At any moment they could come snarling at me, all of these things that I  think are mine that don't belong to me at all. I don't remember everything I've packed under my bed or into my closet; a telling scrap of paper, an old photograph, a letter from my mother that I have taken care to forget could slip out and present itself to me at any moment.  My books, in particular, are just waiting to come after me; they are heavy and solid, uncracked; their edges are sharp.

Notes on the New Neighborhood

So, Beccah, Anna, and I moved. (That’s three-quarters of Catgut.) I would regularly walk down the street to our old house and say to myself, “We live in paradise!” so you might be surprised that we moved at all. The virtues of our old place were well-documented, and extremely precious to me – we shared the street with a community center/art gallery/preschool/feminist therapy center, a community garden, two playgrounds, an elementary school, and the Co-op and its free composting capacity; the Oxford Spa was around the corner; a hidden easement led from our dead-end street to a soccer field that filled with children’s shrieking over the weekend; and Judy Jetson’s and Nomad were but a short after-work jaunt away. Our lives in 3 Sac were in full color, or at least that’s how I felt.

But that is not the point of my writing (see title). This new neighborhood – I really, really like it. Despite losing all of those – what might one call them – services and amenities, I’m very happy. We still have a Hollywood Express near us and what 1369 lacks in scones it more than makes up for in iced mocha lattes (and the fact that its wait staff is neither impatient nor haughty, always a serious blow any social capital the Oxford Spa might have offered), but I think I like our new surroundings in large part because on Sellers Street, which is just around a few corners from my house, is Cambridge’s AIDS service organization, and, co-located with Cambridge Cares About AIDS, is Cambridge’s needle exchange site. I once did an outreach at Cambridge Cares, and – as close readers may know from my (one) previous column – I’m always on shaky ground when trying to reconcile my what happens at work with life at home. So knowing that my clients are coming to my neighborhood for their adherence support groups and their clean needles (or living here already) – well, either it means I’m finding a too-easy synthesis, or it means I sense an tentative thread of commonality, that I might have the capacity to understand more than I thought I did.

A few blocks farther up the road there’s public housing for the elderly and just across Mass Ave there’s a food pantry, Cambridge Children and Family Services, the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, and Centro Presente. All these are places I’d previously known only through aging business cards in my Rolodex, collected by a Client Advocate long before my time.

How well do I know Cambridge, and I am I going to live here for the rest of my life? When am I going to, and what does it mean to, feel like I have a place in a community? What do “community activists” actually do, and are they likeable people? Do things ever change? Who turns dangerous two-way streets into quiet one-ways; who starts arts fairs; who establishes free after-school programs; who puts up the “Domestic Violence Free Zone” street signs; who hosts and does it matter if there are block party potlucks? Do I score marginally higher on the Brooks-Brigham Healthy Adjustment Scale because I recognized a curly-haired HIV counselor-and-tester from my first outreach ever at the Dyke March a few months ago, or because I recognized a woman I went on a hike with in April at Oktoberfest, or because a case manager from that same first outreach is the volunteer advocacy director at the Boston NOW chapter? If I don’t actually talk to them, then why? Is this intersubjectivity, or is it projection? How long do I need to stay here to feel like my life here exceeds what I know about it, exceeds because other people in the neighborhood know my face – or even me – and expect to see me around?

A few weekends ago there was an arts fair in Central Square. As part of the fair I went on a walking tour of Cambridge women’s history. At first I thought I would be the only person on the walk, but about fifteen people materialized before we set off. We walked slowly, and not very far, and tears were pricking through my eyes as we strolled. At the end of the tour after most of the participants had dispersed, I lingered with a group of women in their fifties and sixties who all seemed to be friends; I even followed them into the Toscanini’s near MIT, but then I got too self-conscious and left. Maybe I’ll recognize one of those women on the street someday, and I can pet her dog, and we can say hi.

It’s been 77 degrees outside for several weeks in a row, and it’s October. Maybe I’ll stay.