Rise with the dawn.....

So I'm nervous and now typing cause it will help me calm down. What calms me is honesty of course. So I shall be honest and suck a suck it let's name some names.

Heartbreaking oh so heartbreaking

I figure I can use the general uptick in my readership to bring attention to the things I feel are actually important.

People it's 8am on a Saturday why have nearly 100 of you already come here? Thank you but only the terminally up and awake should pull that shit, hence me.

The monologues I am doing today are great but I'm nervous I, I haven't prepared as I should but I am now so lumps will come as the come.

One is the " Fuck New York" monologue from the 25th hour.

The other is Hecuba from the Trojan Women. Where she finally goes and sends Aeneas to lay waste to the Greeks , to later make Rome.

If nothing else I can connect to the desire to go " so you want to see my bad side? Let me scorch and salt the earth for ya!"

The book imbruglio has made me develop habits I don't like , like having to monitor sites that generally annoy me , or be measured in my responses when my natural tactic is to go reach for the Vaseline , remove earrings, and take out machetes, while experiencing an above average desire to do so.

Why am I so incapable of letting this GO!

And it's made me sit back and realize why.

For all the blowback I have gotten ( with Sylvia and PP ) while not being named , or being ignored as some nebullous class elitist old biddies , and seeing the goalposts move like Penn jsut won the Championships.

I realize that personally , I am reliving MY class experiences, and my race ones, and resource ones.

My friend SalsaN is a teacher , a magnificent educator in A NE city, in a very diverse lower, to mid lower class neighborhood.I am a part time educator /full time busy body with a newly arrived brood of cousins to take care of from 4-19.

An obscene amount of our conversations are filled with " What the FUCK is going on with our baby girls?"

They're isolated, feel unloved, hate their bodies, are materialistic ( without necessarily liking actual stuff), abused, violated, violent, depressed , and are FIRMLY FIRMLY convinced they deserve it in one shape or another. Their schools teach them shit they don't need and can't use. People write for them and to them in ways that thanks to our really poor and un fleshed out attachment to postmodern irony , encourage them to negate these feelings so they can be hip or hardcore.

What I teach emphasizes returns to basics it is decidedly un cool and unflashy. And everyday kids are down right flabbergasted that they can matter, and struggle and still be encouraged if they aren't COOL. I ask them to teach me , I tell them I need to hear whatever it is to make this work.These kids are shocked they matter, that someone will pay such attention to their thoughts and ACTIVELY engage them to yank them out. SalsaN and I marvel at it everyday.

For me it's often because the kids don't believe I exist for real. I am not "pretty" ( Conventionally attractive) , niether am I cool, nor stylish . I am firmly haphazard and decidedly boho in my hairstyle.Plus more likely than not, I am happily and forcefully hood tastic! I'm them often less than five years in the future and they've never seen " me" ( mom,sister ,autie) with a degree, or an intellectual job, or any of the things they are taught are valuable without that person fitting some predetermined script.

For SalsaN they are often flabbergasted the white lady cares.

They are taught through long hours of regret and neglect and erasure and shame, they don't matter, and our baby girls treat themselves like that.
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So when SN told me she was worried . I went fuck it , I will go buy some books I will find some books to give these girls.

And this book failed me in ways I felt I had to express, that Sylvia expressed after reading sections, that PP analyzed in a three part series and finally just to blow of steam in a photo. We gave the book the time, before we couldn't anymore . Sylvia and PP have moved on but for me it just STICKS.

When Jill wrote this it was carom shot ( Nezua teaches me fun words for the veiled things white folk do), let the Wide World of "Allied" Assholery Sports commence

and the comments were worse. She linked PP but somehow managed to avoid being specific. Until PP pointed out that she had read and been fair. Then suddenly it wasn'y all about her .

Goalpost move 2 yards!

I was linked with Sylvia with substantive critiques.

Didn't have time . I'm BUSY

It is more important to be loud and generalizing for my friend than at all contemplative. Those critiques can wait .

AKA

WAIT YOUR TURN I'M BUSY! ensuring she never be challenged unless we approve!

Not a priority 3 points!

Here's link served on a platter ? where are these hip hop feminists? DIRECT LINK. SHE WRITES IN CODE

You're not important enough to actually work for . OFFSIDES!

Finally what's stopping you from getting a book ?

Me:They don't give em out and the problems we have with the book are some reasons why. So could you not be a jerk, and while your at it if your going to ignore us please leave it alone and stop trying to characterize us as members of group who were hurting by daring to expres sour hurt.

That's directed at me ,but I wasn't talking about you , and what would you have me talk about?

OOh the , my feelings! I wasn't talking to you, I'm too lazy to do it .
HAT TRICK!!!!!!!!!!!

What sticks is that all of this our critiques happened not on Feministing,not on Feministe , not on Pandagon. We didn't damper the shine. We went to ourselves and we carved out space to be real.

Suddenly we were with all sorts of people we hadn't even HEARD off and when we mentioned that we were told to sit down , they will tell us how we shall be judged, or OOOPS we didn't take care enough to see your actual problem. But don't you dare be mean or have an opinion while others are . Trojan Horse and all that.

Which made me giggle to death . Honestly . Because my class marker was a need for being direct and open. Social graces what are those? We stepped to you and we stepped full . We might beat your ass but shit you knew we was coming!

And I was being called an elitist by people who were doing all the things i learned as upper class. Obfuscating, claiming there time more important than my work, screaming white woman feelings over brown woman critiques.

I became too young AND too old. I became too smart and too stupid. I was too something to expect to be included and too something else to offer my words.

And my ass gave in . I insisted on reading again( YES I went through it again) , I tried, until I realized I was getting got for doing things In my space and the space of friends. I was being cowed for DARING not to give the" friend" treatment to a movement I was being violently wrangled in to no matter how much I said no.

My pain, our pain our hurt ,academic. People being mean to one of their own ACTIVE.

I was essentially being attacked,ignored,marginalized by women for daring to speak my own truth.

And then they post Staceyann Chin with no fucking irony at all.

Because god forbid my I am not a feminist and do not pull me in and here is why and posts and post of writing be extended the respect that " an Awesome poem " would be.

Or even be respectfully left alone and not run over to make sure you still look good in the google search.

Or posts on Pat Benatar as if us merely saying NO and then saying for us we are first and you don't decide. Is malicious fire.

Confirming once again that to open my mouth is to invite destruction by action and inaction.

All these things are not important , will be gotten to someday, when it was important to THEM not to ME.

This didn't happen with the book. This happened after, because we dared carve out some space.