“Something needs to be said about Rosa Parks other than her feet were tired… Lots of people on that bus and many before and since had tired feet… lots of people still do… they just don’t know where to plant them”
— Nikki Giovanni’s “Harvest” (quoted from Rosa Parks with Princess Weekes on You’re Wrong About)
At the risk of being completely reactionary and petty, speaking ill of my ancestors, and altogether regretting this, here is a curmudgeonly blog post in response to a WhatsApp message that irritated me. Because a blog post in response to a WhatsApp message is what “discourse” (or therapy, rather???) looks like these days.
My biggest takeaway from Machiavelli is that every virtue is a balance between two equal and opposite vices: vice of deficiency, and a vice of excess.
It’s a virtue to be timely.
It’s a vice of deficiency to be a procrastinator.
It’s a vice of excess to be a precrastinator. <-- That's me, I am a precrastinator.
I always cringe at the practically inevitable “What gives you hope?” at the end of an interview, and then double-cringe at the, “Well, I’m an optimist at heart~” that so often follows.
Here are two tidbits I’ve come across recently offer some anti-cringeworthy, if you will, responses which I will be savoring.
Let’s say we’ve established that the world sucks and we are thus motivated to do something about it. Let’s accept that resisting sucky forces is a way of “doing something”. One of my preoccupations is to reshape my own notions of resistance and subversion from something that is loud, in-your-face, and angry to something that is more quiet, mundane, but still angry, aka. something I have the capacity to participate in.
“The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the front of an oncoming train” – David Lee Roth
I am a ball of contradictions floating around in existential limbo. I mean, more so than usual… All this is to say, if I made mud pies out of wilderness, would you pity me enough to buy them on Etsy?
This semester I have the opportunity to formalize some of my past year’s gardening experience by taking the Organic Master Gardener online course through Gaia College. This weekend I had the privilege of attending Guelph Organic Conference. Both activities were mutually informative and are giving me a lot to think about (so much so that I have to write about it!) and I am so grateful that my employers would sponsor my personal and professional development in these ways.
I’ve been thinking about how much I rely on examples for both functions of communication: comprehension and expression. I appreciate having examples to understand, but I fear using example to express. As I become more conscious of how I engage examples in communication, my relationship with them becomes more akin to “reverence”. Examples are powerful communication tools.
In the days following our high school graduation, my friends and I sat in a circle on a patch of lawn beside the school’s science wing where so many memories were made, feeling the weight of going our separate ways and savouring the last moments of normalcy. One of us suggested that we go around the circle brainstorming/imagining each others’ futures–where would so-and-so be in 10 years time? For some, we could unanimously envision specific accomplishments and lifestyles. Other futures provoked theory and debate, or teasing and banter.
My future? It drew blanks.
A memory I have that will always bring me a smile was the moment we met our Tønsberg WWOOF host.
We were still reminiscing our time at the Gjøvik farm, when we stepped off the train from Oslo to Tønsberg into an epic downpour. In our entire time in Norway, we would never seen it rain as hard as it did this day. Without phones to call (both our phones were broken by now) or WiFi to use my laptop, we were left at the train station waiting, trusting that our host would pick us up. Obviously, we didn’t know what the host would look like, but we were hoping our Asian-ness will be enough of an eyesore to catch his attention.
Several minutes later, we see a tall (even for Norwegian standards!) man roll up on a bike in front of us …