Fall is moving really fast and the time change and the related early darkness really got me this year, so much worse than it usually does, and it's never great. The only thing I have today are pictures. It's been really pretty around here for the past week or so, although I don't think there has ever been peak color, maybe because the weather was warm late? I don't know how leaves work. Now it's been raining hard and cold for the past two days (I just wrote and had to erase "years", so you can see how well I deal with this whole weather change situation) so I think we're done with foliage. As usual, it was really nice while it lasted.
Expensive Fruit, Defiant Joy
I read a quote today. "Joy is the ultimate act of defiance", it said. Google told me that Bono said it, and while I'm not one to go around quoting people out of context, especially Bono unless it's an "I still haven't found what I'm looking for" joke—because there is no amateur hour amateur enough for me—I feel this one is pretty accurate.
Every Sunday for the past two years I have gone to the same farmer's market before I show up for a commitment that I have just a couple blocks up the street. I get coffee from the same stand—if you're in DC it's called Zeke's Coffee and you should try it—and then I cruise through the fruit and vegetable tents. Most weeks when I'm not stupid broke I spend too much money on things like Honeycrisp apples that are at their peak for maybe a month or so and cost one million relative dollars in apple money. I justify the cost because they are a staple food with peanut butter for lunch (I mean, I don't even buy bread most of the time, my one self says to my other self while we duke it out over how many are going into the bag) and mostly because if I can't buy these precise apples after I purchase that exact cup of coffee so my Sunday achieves its perfect rhythm then what else can I count on right now? I maybe get an empanada, too, and I'm out of there. The whole trip takes 12 minutes, max. I do this in weeks when the news is terrible and sad, which lately is pretty much every week. I do it when I'm running late, which I should not do, really, but I do it anyway. I have done it every week over this past year punctuated by a loss that still frequently punches me in the gut out of nowhere when I'm driving my car or watching tv, but is nonetheless somehow integrating into the cells of my body so I can carry it a little better along with all of the other stuff I have to do, because I'm still here. I have learned that no matter how I feel there are some things I can count on every day. On Sunday it's the same woman, pretty much always, selling me the coffee. She teaches me faith, swiping my card what looks like way too many times through the reader on her phone to get it to scan, so I'm sure every week that I'll pay for 27 cups of coffee, but somehow it's always only one. There are the same crates of apples and pears and plates full of samples, hand-drawn signs with dollar signs and crowds of people and dogs to weave through, most of them acting out their own personal Sunday ritual, because I vaguely recognize faces now, indistinctly.
I think it's not overstating to say that there is some defiant joy especially right now, this November, in these apples, the color and the stems and the few stubborn leaves still hanging on, the place where I find them, even the bruises.
How I Teach in a Climate of School Shootings
Another rerun because I don't have new words today, so I'm sharing some that I wrote after another mass shooting at a college three years ago. I don't understand living in a country where guns are more important than human life.
Every time a campus shooting has happened in the 13 years since I became a college counselor and professor in Washington D.C., I tell myself that it’s not something that only happens at colleges, and that these things can happen anywhere.
I have repeated this mantra so many times now that I’m starting not to believe it. It turns out it’s not that comforting to remind myself that I could really go to work at any job and die unexpectedly, and that the odds of this happening on my particular campus are still pretty low, as frail a grasp on statistics as I have.
After the Virginia Tech mass murder, I don’t know what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t nothing.
Humans cope in strange ways.
When the college campus shooting happened at Seattle Pacific University a few weeks ago, I saw a tweet from an educator who said that she’d be wearing a bulletproof vest to her campus when school starts again in the fall. At first I assumed she was kidding. Then I wasn’t so sure. The news was advertising protective blankets for students in case of an attack. A loud kneejerk answer to the Sandy Hook massacre was to arm teachers. School supplies may just be evolving with the times.
So I retweeted it, and half meant it myself.
I thought back over the timeline in my brain to August 2001, my debut as an educator. 9/11 happened a month later. Then, one year later, D.C. faced the Beltway snipers. The first of this series of random murders in my area was just 10 minutes from the campus where I worked. Eventually, our own campus was put on lockdown because the unknown shooters were killing people in quick succession from their vehicle, and it was unclear where they’d end up next. So they thought it best that we all stay put.
Twelve years later, the region has settled down, but it’s not something I forget. It’s not something my body has forgotten, either — I can tell just by the reactions it elicits when I think about it. You can never go back to a time before you knew about, or experienced something traumatic. It doesn’t define, but it informs. I don’t know why we still don’t all walk from the gas pump to the car in zigzags anymore, really. That simple life task required Zumba moves to make you more likely to miss a bullet, and God forbid you had to go inside and pay.
After the Virginia Tech mass murder, I don’t know what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t nothing. I expected to feel more protected or to see a reduction in access to assault weapons to the average person in my country. I’ve often thought about my peers, the counselors who may have worked with Seung-Hui Cho, the student who ended up killing 32 people and himself, or those who have worked with any of the people who have killed students and faculty at so many schools around the country. I wonder what they said to Cho, what they didn’t say and how they now live with that.
I think about what I say to my students, and what I don’t say, and how I do not close my door during a session ever. I think about how I subconsciously scan duffel bags and jackets for something I probably couldn’t detect anyway. I think about some of the escalated conversations that occur when 18-year-olds don’t get what they want or expect. I think about what I’d report, and what I’d think of later that I’d wish I had said. Because now it all makes sense, that throwaway comment or offhand reference. I have passing thoughts sometimes, during and after an interaction, that a potential for a scary outcome might be result. But it never has in my experience, so I don’t dwell on it. I can’t. I keep moving.
I wish I didn’t have to think about my job that way. I wish I was as confident in being the outspoken, fairly demanding teacher and adviser I’ve always been, knowing that it’s next to impossible to predict if someone around me might pull the trigger. Often during these shootings, the people who are gunned down aren’t of particular significance to the perpetrator — they are symbols of perceived injustice. In the wrong place at the horribly wrong time. They could have been anyone.
I think back to Tech, and beyond that to Columbine, and more recently, to the much littler littles at Sandy Hook. I think about possible survivor guilt, the natural human impulse to feel relieved it wasn’t you, and if it wasn’t you, how much guilt we then may feel in response to that relief. Regardless, no one around could possibly ever be the same. No one wins.
No one should die just because they show up for school or work, and that where they work or go to school happens to be where a person with deep issues and some guns is headed. No one. No matter how many times it happens, no matter how serious comments about bulletproof vests become, it will never be just another day at the office. I feel like it’s framed that way on the news sometimes, and it scares me for us, quite frankly. It makes me wonder what motivates humans and governments and societies to act. How bad does it have to get?
I may never stop wondering what kind of teacher I’d be if I didn’t have all of this in the back of my mind — not in the forefront, mind you, because we are too busy. There is work to do, and we have to keep on doing it. But it’s there. And I’ll never stop wondering, in terms of the shooters: what could we have done for you? And would you have listened anyway? Would we?
I can advocate for change. I can speak up. I can hope for the best. But mostly what happens is that I just keep doing my job.
Why I Don’t Need You to Mansplain It to Me
I wrote this last year for TueNight. I'm rerunning it here because I can.
As I walked to my seat at a gathering last week, a male acquaintance grabbed me by the elbow, spilling my coffee.
“Whoa,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“That’s what you get for not saying hello to me,” he said.
“You spilled my coffee,” I said and kept walking.
I could focus on the details here of how I know this person casually and that he has previously told me out of the blue that I’m “intimidating” and that I don’t speak to him as much as he’d like me to. I could get into how I get nervous in groups and how I generally need to locate a safe spot and/or a safe person in the room, and in that process I can skip acknowledging people accidentally. And God knows I probably don’t smile enough at anyone, especially men, based on feedback I’ve gotten whether I’ve asked for it or not.
I can note how I was walking to that safe spot the other night with my too-full coffee when he interrupted me by suddenly grabbing my arm.
I can add that was a terrible waitress for way too long in college, and I’ve never have been very good at serving up conversation on command either.
What I’ve focused on since then, though, and what I think made the primal anger travel straight from my nervous system to my suddenly red cheeks and temples and a sudden shaking in my hands, is this constant, insidious, entirely flawed idea that I got what I deserved. Because that’s what “That’s what you get” means: retribution for not delivering what this man thinks he’s owed — that disconnect between expectation and reward that flies right out of coffee cups onto the floor.
Last week wasn’t great between men and me across the board, honestly. Another man raised his voice to me in a meeting over something I had no idea I was doing wrong, and two more dominated another room and me to the point that I kept uncharacteristically quiet rather than try to talk over them. I shrank back into my seat. Opted out.
“I’m not an eyelash batter,” I said to a friend the day after the coffee-spilling incident. “I am fundamentally incapable.”
Please note: Even assertive women can be intimidated. Even women who are not prone to backing down can get the signal that it’s certainly emotionally and perhaps even physically unsafe to keep going. I’m even prone sometimes to rewinding the conversation in my mind for hours after, looking mostly for what I could have done differently to keep things from going off the rails, even feeling some ridiculous programmed shame and guilt for everything said and not said.
At the same time, in this contentious and very loud political season, on the internet the world over, I’ve watched for months as other men explained to some of the most brilliant, politically engaged women I know how primaries work and why Hillary Clinton doesn’t have the experience to be president and why these women don’t understand who they’re voting for, not really, and also about the economy and war.
“I understand the delegate count,” one political strategist friend said to a man who was unnecessarily explaining the delegate count to her. “I’ve been in politics for a long time.”
I dislike the term “mansplaining” as much as I hate the action, and I therefore wish I didn’t encounter so many reasons recently to use it in life and on the internet. I knew exactly what it was five years ago when a man interrupted my basketball conversation in a bar to correct my already-correct statements about three-point shots. I told him I edited a sports blog; he ignored me and kept talking as I backed away from a conversation with someone who was not interested in hearing what I had to say. More recently, I wish I hadn’t had to address a real life friend who followed a trail of my comments to another friend’s Facebook wall — a stranger to him — to leave an unpleasant comment about Senator Clinton. I didn’t want to have to respond to yet another 2016 standard issue, “feel the Bern/Shillary sucks,” thinly-veiled misogynistic statement. I don’t want conflict with my friends or anyone. But I know that not responding is assent, and even though I pick my battles, that does leave some of them to be picked. So I took a deep breath, typed and deleted a few times and asked him respectfully not to use profanity on my colleague’s Facebook wall.
This life as a person who speaks up, who is interested in discourse and who often breaks the gendered social contract can be a real drag. And sometimes it feels futile; like maybe I’m the fool? Like maybe I’d be better off as the flirt or the seen-and-not-heard woman that I am absolutely not designed in any way to be. But more than tiring, maddening or pointless, it feels necessary, especially in these times of Trump and Brock Turner and injustice for Sandra Bland and Facebook threads that call Elizabeth Warren the c-word for not backing a particular presidential candidate.
Raised in a fairly traditional family environment where I nonetheless had the relative freedom to speak my mind, I knew about gender inequality in theory but my idealistic bubble was real. I had several aunts who might make their brothers and husbands dinner, but would go head-to-head with them and with each other in political and social debate at family reunions where everyone was definitely not on the same ideological page. I had uncles who were more like my brothers, who argued politics and pretty much everything else with me for sport. I was just as likely to be asked by a relative about school and what I planned to do for a career as about who I was dating, which is good because I had a lot to say about the former and, more often than not, absolutely nothing of interest to share about the latter. I went to an all-girls high school where whatever limits we had in Catholic rules and regulations were balanced by the fact that young women were the community; we were its student governance, academic achievers and social structures.
I couldn’t name misogyny until I’d lived it — in the workplace, in the street, and in pretty much every social situation. I was motivated in college — just a year or so outside of my bubble — to learn how hard women have had to work to receive basic rights like voting and equal compensation, never mind the right to walk the streets day or night in the outfits of our choosing or to speak confidently to anyone of any gender without fear of verbal and physical assaults. I have become aware of the even harder road that women of color have to travel. I am mindful of all of the work that still needs to be done to get women’s voices heard.
So when I face misogyny in real life, when I feel the literal burn on my face of condescension, of a man tacitly questioning my intelligence or stating in euphemism or sometimes just plain English that my voice and my choice to use it or not is subject to his approval, when I am touched without my invitation or approval by a man who is dissatisfied with my behavior, I don’t know why I am still, naively, stupidly shocked. I should know better by now, but it’s possible that I still just want to believe better — of people and of a culture that isn’t changing fast enough to suit me, I guess. It’s also true that programming runs deep.
“I’m not an eyelash batter,” I said to a friend the day after the coffee-spilling incident. “I am fundamentally incapable.”
“I am,” she said. “Raised that way. And don’t worry — it’s not a better way to be.”
I’m sorry to report that I ever doubt my voice all while I feel constantly compelled to use it, and I’m certain that I always will. I’ll raise it if I have to, although this is not always my preference, at least not in conflict. I know that there will be times when I will wish I could tone it down. When that happens, I should probably try to recall that time when that guy grabbed my arm and spilled my coffee and how I stated for the record that that was not okay with me, got some napkins and wiped up the mess.