also_warriors

Can I embed?

I would be more bothered by how frequently I hear my downstairs neighbors having sex if this dude weren't objectively, an excellent moaner.

So I just "finished" writing this paper that feels like so much of what I have been trying to say for the past 3 years of grad school, or 20 years of school, or 24 years of being alive. It's not all there yet, but at this moment, this paper is bringing me so much closer to what I need to say, and I think I finally have a thesis topic.

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4Mq0LbY66mcMTVmODBkMjEtMTc4OS00ZDdiLWJkN2EtNGIxMjY2NDk3ZGMy

Abstract: where the Hell are our bodies in activism and academia, and why are so few people talking about and honoring what it costs us to either avoid or nurse that question and still stay alive?

I think the words that actually made it onto the page might be somewhat different, but right now, I feel like I know where I need to go.

I was talking to a professor after class about the fact that my essay was not technically done due to the fact that my life is a GD mess, and she saw in my backpack that I had a spoon. I said embarrassed, yes, also, a lot of cigarette butts, but at least I wasn't littering, which is something.

Then she told me that in the book she is currently shopping around, which is about healing trauma through yoga, she observes that trauma survivors are great supporters of their local economy-- they buy cigarettes, they buy razor blades, they buy band-aids, they buy ice cream. They are keeping the US economy afloat.

We could not stop laughing.

If you press
two hearts together
through walls of
bone and skin,
each will learn
a new rhythm,
they will pump
blood as one.

So when I am strong
and you are weak,
let me hold your heart
and start it again.



PS: I want to name this something cheesy like "American Heart Journal," or "Journal of Modern Cardiology," which are real things, or "The Journal of Human Percussion," which is not. "Digest" is a nice word, too.
PPS: Apparently this is true!

turns out it is stage 4 lung cancer, which metastasized into his hip. That's pretty much all I know right now.

exhausted,

Two things i have noticed: Sometimes I will find myself breathing shallowly, every part of my body tense, and it will take some time to identify this as anxiety or fear, and I often cannot find a source. This usually means that I read something that triggered me, but wasn't present enough to catch it until I was checking in later.

The other day, I was feeling this and I kept on reading Tumblr, probably something the BS in Pennsylvania. After reading some bad stuff that I should NOT have read, the tension lessened.

Which brings me to this quote:

A lot of people don’t heal, and it manifests in a lot of different ways throughout their lives. There’s a study they did with Vietnam vets who’d had—clearly—a lot of trauma during the war. Twenty years later, they measured their levels of pain before and after they showed them intense footage from Vietnam. Pretty much across the board, after they saw this really intense, violent footage from the war, their levels of pain went down. Because when trauma doesn’t get to work itself through your system, your system idles at a heightened state, and so getting more really intense input calms your system down.” Which is why, she explains, “A lot of folks who’ve survived trauma end up being really calm in crisis and freaking out in everyday life.
(From "How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD," which has some ethical issues that makes me want not to link to it, but this idea is very useful to me.)

I've been thinking a lot about testosterone this week, and feeling more positively about it than I have for a long time. One of the things i tried to say to my therapist last week is that it feels very inappropriate for people to try to push me toward testosterone to deal with mental illness (working again off the idea that my mood was better when I was on T, and I didn't injure). She said that actually T is sometimes used for cis men for depression, and something about that felt like relief. I dislike medications in general. I think there always comes a time when I want to believe I am better, go off, and find that I am emphatically not. With anti-depressants, it historically has taken a few years between attempts. Seems fitting that it would be the same with T.

There are other fears here, too, which I am having a hard time placing. That it won't make things better and I will be broken forever. That it will make things better and I will have to learn how to be whole. Part of me is afraid of what it means for injury. A lot of what injury is doing right now is helping me to contain things. The motion I find myself making when talking about how injury feels is of wrapping something in paper and putting it into a box. That's the way it feels. That something is being carefully preserved [and put away for later. I do not understand why i just started crying and hyperventilating i do not understand wh y i just had to amke the decision that i don't know how to have panic attacks anymore. because I have forgotten how to do that silently, and it would have oto be silent since i already let out a huge wracking sobbing gasp]


[it is because what if injry is the only thing keeping things carefully sealed up and preserved and without it, with T, I have to feel things insted.]

So maybe I will create a poetry friends group for anyone who is interested?

Simple math               
He turned the lions loose, they say.
Eight bears, an old baboon,
eighteen endangered tigers.
A monkey is still missing,
swinging through the elm trees,
or already consumed by this sudden suburban jungle.

They lament with strident urgency
the paltry four tranquilizer guns
and their three-minute delay,
a seven-mile roadblock,
the sudden fall of night.
It's simple math:
fifty-six of them,
families to protect, and children,
locked car windows,
and 9-1-1 calls.

Desperate to explain the leaden carcasses of
thirty-five great cats,
the former zoo-keeper's death is a 22-caliber footnote
in the real news of the day.

I am still working on this one...

[7:17]

you come back to me in a memory
of frantic morning primping,
a hurricane of flat-ironed hair and unironed pants.
the bathroom mirror still fogged
by your shower and breath as you squintingly apply eyeliner, shouting
"time check!" every few minutes.

you are always late.

it takes some time to trace the memories
of women i have loved and not deserved
before i get to your name and face,
two words instead mean the essence of you.

i     have never been good with time.
i     have never been good with months or years.
i     looked after those hands with unblinking dedication.

and
sleepless tuesday mornings, i wonder
who it is that now attends
to the ticking of your clocks.