oh, good. it’s the holiday season.

I believe in indignation-in expressing it, feeling it and even maintaining it. Of course, there’s a point when it becomes toxic, but I think women spend too much time worrying about anger and indignation being justifiable to indulge it when it is appropriate. The reason I’m bringing this up is because it’s the holiday season, and on the list of things that fill me with rage is this narrow concept of family, specifically that we’re supposed to love each other because we’re related.

Thanksgiving and Christmas, like Sunday evenings, have always felt unbelievably lonely to me. It’s not because I don’t celebrate Christmas (nauseating consumerism, your table is ready), although that was an issue when I was younger and didn’t know so many other Jews, but because I can’t get my head around people wanting to hang out with their families. Family has always been such a sore spot for me, because it’s something I lack in the traditional sense. For years, my friends have been my family, but it’s hard to explain that to people without getting into the whole bloody story, which is exhausting.

A good friend of mine told me recently that she felt like going to her family for holidays was like crash landing in another universe. It made me grateful that I usually spend Thanksgiving happily watching 90210 reruns (the original one). Her adult self, values, and experiences were completely at odds with her family’s, so either conversation was incredibly strained or non existent. How exhausting it is to be ourselves, I thought when she told me, and how brave we are for doing it in spite of everyone and everything else. If we’re lucky, we’ll have people in our lives who will love us not just in spite of who we are, but because of it.

new piece

my new piece on JStreet and Israel education is up on <a href=”http://makom.haaretz.com/blog.asp?bId=192“>the Makom blog</a>. Leave a comment if you’d like.

further proof that i do not know everything

Two years ago, I was in Nicaragua on a service trip with my students. I was walking alone down the road on the way back from helping a sick student. A group of men were walking towards me, talking loudly in Spanish and laughing. My insides froze. They are going to rape me. Or kill me. Or both. Instead, they smiled at me, and kept walking. I found my breath again, and felt deeply ashamed.

It’s not hard to find the source of these fears. Part of it is that I know rape statistics, and how real they are. But even more so, I know that, like everyone, I have been inundated with racist ideas about people of color, specifically Black and Latino men, from day one. The fact that my family lived in a city, beside an apartment building that housed many low income people of color didn’t help, and neither did the fact that my mother was a single parent and frantic about resources. She saw competition between “us,” hard workers and deserving of help, and “them,” who took advantage of the government instead of working. In retrospect, this is a perfect example of how the system we live in plays oppressed people off of one another, resulting in anger, suspicion and fear.

Today is the first day of training for the trip I’m coleading to Ecuador in January. It’s a women’s leadership trip, so we’ll be talking about sexism, internalized sexism, feminism, race, and sexuality, as well as globalization and socio economic class. I always get nervous before these things, because I believe tit’s the most important work there is, and therefore, feels really high stakes to me. I often put crazy pressure on myself to do it perfectly, although there isn’t such a thing. There’s always another opportunity to engage, to push the conversation further, to share another experience, but there’s no one way, and that’s the part that’s both heartening and terrifying.

Among the worst things that oppression takes from us is our ability to be our authentic selves. It hinders us from having genuine relationships with each other, because of what beliefs and constructions about race, gender, sex, etc, have taught us. Especially as women, we’re socialized to not say what we mean, to always be nice, polite, kind. So it’s especially difficult to say, “It’s hard for me to be real with you because I have this recording in my head that people like you are ___(lazy, stupid, violent, etc). I want those thoughts to go away, but it’s going to take a lot of time and work.”

It’s easy for me to write this, but to say it to a peer, a friend, a coworker, is a different thing altogether, and that’s where the work must happen. It doesn’t mean I’m going to be good at it, but that isn’t the point. It’s not work that’s traditionally associated with achievement, because we’re not supposed to be thinking about this stuff in the first place. Therefore, every act we perform in relation to it, every way that we use our privilege to make change, is subversive.

On a final note, It’s hard for me to write these things about my mother. I’m talking so much about her in these posts, and I didn’t mean to. Both her life and her death have made me the person that I am, doing the work that I couldn’t do if I wasn’t her daughter. It adds an entirely new level to the phrase “the personal is political.”

two things of interest

1.On Monday night, I went to a panel with Jonathan Ames, Jason Schwartzman, Ted Danson and John Hodgman at the Paley Center for Media. They were discussing the new HBO show, “Bored to Death,” which Ames wrote and is executive producing, and Danson and Schwartzman (and on one occassion, Hodgman) star in. Jonathan Ames is one of my favorite writers, and I will mainly do anything Jason Schwartzman tells me to do, so this was all very nerdily exciting. Anyway, at one point, Schwartzman described Ames’ writing as being “the double helix of truth and imagination.” It’s often how I’ve thought of my own work, and therefore, a nice insight.

2. I’ve been really frustrated lately about all the consumption around me. Of particular interest/ire are paper cups and plastic water bottles and bags, but I’m also talking about consumption of time and energy and money, which is why things like iphones and kindles and blackberries also annoy me. I have a tendency to be a hermit, so I don’t like people to be able to reach me all the time, and I never want to live in a world where all books are electronic. And of course, there’s a connection to class here, as there is always, concerning access and globalization and all that, which I won’t get into now. To contextualize, I also refused to buy a cell phone until I moved to New York three years ago, and I bought an ipod last year. So maybe it’s coming for me, too. But I doubt it.

fiction update

Three of my pieces, “The Virtues of Not Sleeping,” “The Eighth Wonder of the World,” and “Lunch at Days Inn” are now up at http://bit.ly/10qVu6.