Why Are We So Slow As A Country??

If you haven't seen this amazing comic-commentary pseudo-commercial from Will Ferrell friends speaking out against Big Health Care Companies making billions off of keeping Americans sick, then go see it now!!

When will we realize its crazy that we are the only westernized wealthy country who doesn't care about the health of our citizenry? No wonder we're the fattest country in the world, the insurance companies need us to be!

Reading: Remember, Savor, Repeat

Been away a while. Needed to not think about typing anything, even something as therapeutic as this blog. Time to be without technology... I wanted to read regular old books and watch Law and Order and relax. Of course I can't do that, I have to take a summer language class.  A dreadful invention meant to induce migraines. I need to read a Good Book and have to lingering worry about generals questions later on. 

Reading as therapy. Which reminded me of something.

Months ago, a professor in giving advice to a student applying to PhD programs near me advised her not to put something pedestrian in her application essay like she wants to go to grad school because she likes reading. And I've let that ruminate for a while now.... because you see, I put that I love reading in my essay.

Did this professor read my essay? Did others think me boring for the statement? Because I meant it in  no germane context.

I think we take reading for granted far too often forgetting the insanity of scribbled black marks becoming... Yes, becoming.

We forget how complex the manner of inscribing language which we think we know but which - like driving over certain speeds or the ocean after you've reached a certain distance from shore - is truly not within our control. We forget to consider that how we use what we say in specific ways to achieve certain ends, and how when written down in what is allegedly a stable form, there is still that false bottom hat where the rabbit is hiding. We forget that all too often what we throw out does not bounce the way we thought it would, and challenges our ability to clean up mess with more mess - far riskier lobs.  Language, reading, is playing tennis on the unpredictable clay courts of the French Open.  Reading is trusting that when the man in the trick jacket - the author in her desk chair - says he will Cut You In Half for the pleasure of the audience, and ultimately himself, that he is in fact quite skilled at his craft. You hope that you will end up dazzled, charmed, bewildered, but not truly physically injured - unable to put yourself back together again.

Reading is, we must consider reading as, an act of pure magic.

Or how often do we forget the quantum physics of reading, how on the subparagraph level, under careful observation, one sentence can cripple the experiment. How the frequency of reading can increase understanding or pervert the course of connection. In reading, what we write down, what other perceive, what time does to the slant of a phrase, to the inflection on a word, to the very internal stability and length of time that text will last, are all unstable elements warring with each other, with the page itself, in a fight for dominance. What learning and information do to how language flows through us, flows through our mouths, through the synaptic connections we barely understand, and into air that is different every single moment, and over the tricky substance of time's flow... these my friends, are what we consistently forget.

Reading as a fundamental state of altered consciousness.

So when I say that I love reading in my essay, I make no ho hum space filler. What I wanted, tried to convey was the deeply spiritual connection I have to the written word. How a good book is my temple and there is serenity, salvation within. How the right series of words, or the right individual word, can freeze me in time, literally contradict the laws of this universe, to allow me my own bubble of perfect understanding, a unity that is ephemeral but whose impact is my life. That so many books have healed me - usually baptisms by fire, truth is not sweet - and filled spaces I did not know were there until I lifted the book and felt at ease. 

Reading as the serene experience of glancing into a dark, still pond of water, of unknown depth, from the comfort of a sturdy boat, hand trailing the water, summer skies full of sun. The summer breeze is not strong enough to ruffle pages to distraction/frustration of course.

I do not besmirch the oral tradition from which I have most certainly sprung. But there is something to the creamy, slippery texture of the page, the minuscule dimples, the uneven quality of most paper.  The places where the printer's ink failed, left off half of a word, top or side, or maybe just the dot on an i, reminding you that each book is in fact individual, and must be made page by individual page - "one million in print" be damned!  

There is a sensation that sinks into a book you've had a long, long time, like it has absorbed some of you into the crinkled/wrinkled edges, brown from turning pages.  A profound connection in the tea stains, and corners worn soft - so often used to absentmindedly clean under fingernails.  Something within the gesture of filling hundreds of pages with the attempt to tell a story, share a bit of consciousness - however faulty the execution may/might end up - and in your own attempt, in reading, to understand that story and, by extension, the impulse to inscribe it in just this way. There is fascination in language/books' execution, ingestion, processing, integration...

These, yes these are the things which we must: remember, savor, repeat.

Minor Meditation: Emancipation

The problem with America's 1865 emancipation of the enslaved was that, African Americans were so busy envisioning a freedom like Whites had been parading around for centuries, denied any model of alternative liberty in a brown body as they were, that they could not conceptualize a space of freedom for those Whites without their having a place in it.

In other words, had they known better, they would have realized the American constitution held no hand of opportunity out to them – it could not even see them. The freedom they envied, depended upon their remaining enslaved.

Minor Meditation: Conservative Capitalism IS an Ideology!

Forced to post this reply to a crazy person who has no ability to self-reflect (let alone reflect on why he thinks the way he does) at this site when I realized that some people still think that we all crawled out of the sludge or God placed us in the garden (or however they think we got here) and we all had Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in the amniotic sac with us.
Hey ya'll!: Capitalism is an ideology, a belief system, just like anything else!
Sigh:

"The proper conservative view is we’re all equals, trading (or not) by our own decisions, right or wrong. People may end up trading in ways you and I dislike, but the general principle of freedom is valued more than imposing a specific moral view." -Antioch

Antioch here is unfortunately making an argument that wouldn't hold a feather let alone water! To argue that enforcing a Conservative/Republican agenda is to NOT force people to do as you wish is a false tautology! You are still very much forcing people to do as you wish, AND it is also forcing a moral code on everyone to boot! To situate the value and worth of a person as involving trade is already to steep yourself in an ideological tradition that not everyone adheres to, and which has very flawed moral underpinnings!

The only thing is, we're starting to realize that the moral crap that we have sunk ourselves in does not provide for any sort of viable future if we do not include healthcare for everyone. For Antioch to argue he doesn't want to be forced to pay for "those other people" (you know, like they're not neighbors, citizens, with whom we share the same water sources and food producing fields...) is the same as saying that people are not being forced right now to die and suffer and acrue debt due to inadequate or nonexistent healthcare!

Oh, you don't wanna pay for it now, but we'll ALL be paying for it in the future alright. We'll be paying when something far worse than swine flu shows up and we don't have enough doctors or adequate healthcare. We'll pay when we don't have a citizenry who have had consistent healthcare all their lives to shore up their immune systems, so America gets hit with a superbug and becomes the black hole into which no one will go or invest money because We Let People Die here.

Now Antioch, that's not a moral code that makes any sense at all.

Minor Meditation: Your Body is Not Yours

After I don't know how many comments, touches, and untold amounts of attention paid to my breasts by people of both sexes, I get it. I'm not in Puerto Rico anymore, where no one cares if its hot and you wear a tank top because its hot all the time - how lucky was I to live in a place where it was strange if you were covered up? But that's all Over. Any newfound comfort with my larger, non-traditional self that I may have learned there must be unlearned now because I am back on the mainland and my body is not mine. It belongs to the man picking up garbage, the bartender at the bar, supposed friends who feel instantly at liberty to poke and/or comment, the Black men who think they own me because my skin is brown, the gay male friend for whom women and breasts are a freakish oddity, and, well... anyone else. 

My choices are to stay fully covered up at all times like the overweight, busty girl I know myself to be, or suffer the "minor" violations and assaults, daily harassment, that we women know are our lot....

I am so tired.

I will stay fully covered up from now on.