“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)
I’m working from home, but it’s also the most social I’ve ever had to be for work. In the time of corona, I feel oddly entitled to having alone time, and having to take phone calls has felt uniquely invasive. Phones are basically designed to reach into the confines of my home to sap my precious energy in the very place (and at the very times) I expect to recharge. Oh, how I resent them.
It turns out we’re really good at staying at home. Like really good.
I wouldn’t be lying if I told you that it irks me when people blog about milestones in their lives, say, their birthday, with an air of reflective melodrama.
I also wouldn’t be lying if I told you that it irks me even more when said bloggers start posting about their birthday with a disclaimer that they don’t like talking about their birthday but nevertheless continue to vomit out an entire post pregnant with pensiveness, meandering with mindfulness, and spewing self-awareness of everything save their own bullshit.
Is it just me, or have our words gone into hibernation? A friend intends to write a poem and gives up when he realizes he just doesn’t have the words. Another has the desire to pray, but wishes for modern liturgies and pre-scripted prayers because, sometimes, the words just don’t come!
Likewise, only 30% of my latest blog post were my own words (2469/3616 words were part of direct quotes). Even in my parallel journaling life, where I can usually fill several pages at a time with no trouble (other than hand cramps), my most recent entries are as close as I can imagine to what brain farts would look like on paper. I’ve resorted to copying passages of text verbatim, perchance to channel the energy of others at their best while I am at my worst.
“Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
If the internet is dark and damp room, then this website is a little nest I’ve made in the back-rightmost corner of that room.
I’ve made this nest at an interesting time. See, I am in a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Long long ago, when chickens had teeth, I was under the impression that work is mostly neutral, generally apolitical, and probably minimally oppressive. And so I spent my life up until now studying to find work I love doing. Two diplomas later, I’ve learned that nothing is neutral, nothing is apolitical, and that work I thought I would love doing is, by default, complicit in systems of oppression. Too bad it took putting all my eggs in the wrong basket to come to this conclusion.
Being neither trained nor competent to do work that might actually be worth doing, is it still possible to scratch out a living doing something that isn’t detrimental to the earth or the life on it? Or will I just chicken out and help some rich guy get richer? For now, I am incubating this little piece of the web and hoping that by brooding over it (read: flailing like a headless chicken) an idea will hatch… one that my bird brain hasn’t the imagination to dream of on its own. This, I pray.
Oh, why hello there, dear Reader. Why do you look as though you are walking on eggshells? Feel free to eavesdrop, snoop around, and make yourselves at home, but please take off your shoes before you come in. Afterall, the little segments of coloured yarn and meticulously placed twigs that form this nest were lovingly salvaged; only the softest and colourfullest yarn, only the twigs that most resemble dragons’ whiskers (well, to me at least) were selected. Welcome.