Back to School: a journal entry

At 7:45 on Thursday morning I had to clean out the rotted food in our broken fridge before the repair man came by and noticed how rancid it was. After a rushed job of tossing jars and produce bags into a hefty bag I hopped on my bike ready to whizz away to my volunteer gig that started at 8:25. Too bad my tire was flat, and the ride share service I usually rely on was not working at the time. I finally got there at 8:40 after calling my partner and having him send a car to me from another ride share service. I arrived late just in time for action.

This week I started volunteering as an in-class writing and reading tutor for a local Oakland high school. I chose this program because of it's integrated vision. It gives individualized attention to students during school hours and its methods are built off of a respectful student-centered "meet the writer/reader where they are at" philosophy. So I don't have to worry about 'motivating' my student to get a good grade (unless the student cares about that, which most do).

Right now I am working with three students, who for the sake of anonymity I'll call Marco, Emma, and Brent.

Immediately after I arrived I was assigned to work with Emma. She had trouble looking at me. She fidgeted frequently. I think felt shame/embarrassment about the very small amount of work she had done so far, but also about the kind of work she thought she would do. I think, based on what she was telling me, she is going to write about thoughts of self harm, among other things. Which is some heavy shit indeed.

I wondered very briefly about talking to her teacher about what she told me. But for the moment, for this week, I want to keep her trust. And as a person who regularly contemplates self harm I believed that it was only thoughts. I hope I'm right. I feel some regret about this decision and I made a promise that if she mentions it again I will let her know that those kinds of thoughts can be very serious. Let her know I care about her well being and ask if she want help finding a teacher or a counsellor to talk to about those them.

But that resolution was made long after she and I interacted. Most of the time when I am working with these student writers I ask questions, listen, and write down everything they say (as much if it as my slow hands can catch). Afterwards I hand over the sheet of what I transcribed and say "look how much work you got done!"

A little later than I was supposed to, I switched to working with Marco fro the rest of this period. He let me sit awkwardly in silence for the better half of out time together while he worked through the finishing touches of the assignment he had a very good handle on. He did ask me he read his work to him and we talked a little about it. It was nice to see him get his poem on independently. However I couldn't help but feel I should have offered more assistance or more something at least. I always feel that way when the student knows what they're doing and has now fears/anxious about their work.

During the next class I had the privilege of working with Brent for the entire period. Who, when I plunked down next to him was certain that I was Johnny Law and that I'd arrived to tell him to get to work and do it right. He was determined not to show that he might have a good time writing.

Now I did tell him to get work done, but I also told him that writing poetry is work. And I'm sure there was a danger in writing what he wrote about disliking school. I told him "You can like the writing you do at school and still hate school. A lot of school is pretty much bull shit. But the work you do here can still matter to you."

Mostly we sat in silence together while he wrote a fantastic poem that used to assigned form to draw out the delicious contrast between expressing his respect to family and performing empty gestures of "respect" required by school.

I know I'm no supposed to pick favorites, but jesus, he wrote 12 lines of searing words from just a bubble of brainstormed words. Hell, I write poetry as a calling and usually can't to that in 45 minutes. I was most impressed with him (even though Marco was further along). Before I had to leave we scholgged through how he might include alliteration and more sensory details (the reqs of the assignment). While he clearly resented being required to include these elements, I'm pretty sure he enjoyed learning about and experimenting with them. I found his reluctant enjoyment of writing very exciting.

As I was leaving I saw Emma in the hall surrounded by friends. She smiled at me and said "that's my writing coach".

That smile made me forget all about the horrible details of my moldy flat-tire morning.

Allen's Treehouse*

When I was fifteen my bother had a saw fall on his head from 20 ft in the air. I don't remember if I actually saw this happen or not but there's a clear picture in my mind of what happened and I remember thinking he was dead or that surely he was doing to die. My brother is not dead. Though they did put several staples into a considerable gash that was smack dab in the middle of his hairline.

My brother has always been interested in beautifully doomed ideas (not that he'd ever call them that). During his teenage years he'd blather incessantly about plans for a perpetual motion engine. I loved him for that.

The saw dropped from a bucket of tools he was hoisting a up to the platform he'd rigged between the two douglas firs that loomed over my dad's garage. Allen had set up a complex system of ropes and pulley's in order to bring up the tools and the doors he'd salvaged from the clutches of condemned buildings.

Nothing brought more color to his face than encountering a sturdy old thing he'd found a new use for. (I look forward to growing old with my brother). He was going to build the entire treehouse out of the heavily beveled planks that sat in old frames and had, without humans, lost their vocation. It disappoints me deeply that my shame-prone, teenage-poet self never noticed how lovely of  project he'd embarked on (though I guess nobody starts out a good poet huh?)

Sometimes we, we being he, myself, and our little sister Ariel, would climb up there to play cards together or just to get away from our parents for a while. Nothing against our parents, but we lived in a small house. We were all post pubescent or in the full throes of it by that point. And kids over a certain age just feel some relief knowing there's a place in the world where adults the age of their parents can't get to.

This was not a tree house for children though. At nearly forty feet up the climb was physically strenuous and probably too dangerous even for us. You'd arrive at the top pretty winded and surprisingly grateful to have something solidly geometric and level for your body to rely on. It was never not scary for me. Though I think Allen was never afraid. Sometimes I think  he never is.

It was a paradise up there. Seriously. It only takes thirty feet of climbing to reach an altered state. And us being the super uncool straight edge kids were were (I think I was even afraid of drinking beer at the time) it was the most badass we got to feel. When school let out for summer we took our binders up and threw them all the way down.

But one day in August a strong gust of wind blew in, brusquely tossing half our playing cards onto the neighbor's roof. That malicious chunk of wind also knocked loose a door that had yet to be strapped to anything. It hit Ariel on the shoulder and head pretty hard, and she decided never to climb up there again.

I still went though. Still dreamed with my brother about how good it was going to look with all those unhinged things brought together against the wind and in spite of gravity and expired purposes.

But when he dropped that saw on himself, and was rushed to the hospital in need of metal teeth to hold together the new mouth he'd almost opened in his skull, our parents got scared. And we stopped trying to make lofty things out of old openings and rusty hinges.

The treehouse waited half finished and lonely for about a week. Then a bunch of raccoons braved the heights and started a family up there. The last time I climbed up (without my parent's permission) the whole place smelled like shit and animals.

Three years ago the city had my family cut those trees down. And now whenever I visit my childhood home there's too much sky. I have no idea what happened to the treehouse of old doors. I like to think it's ghostly opening still hangs up there, 20 feet above the mossy roof of my father's garage. But the wind probably blew that away too.


*as with all memoir, the exact details of this piece are subject to vast amounts of creative misremembering and some pretty shady guesswork.

In defense of Questioning: it's the journey that matters

This post was partly inspired by this piece and a very brave (possibly questioning) daughter.

I know, I know, you, dear reader might be thinking something like “Didn't people stop using that term 1998?”, “Isn't 'questioning' for teenagers?” or “Don't we use 'queer' now?”

Well for starters I'll let you know right off the bat I do identify as queer. But I also identify as questioning. We'll have to go back a few years to show how I got to this identity. So here we go.

I've always had an urge to seek out and admit that which I do not know. I registered for advanced classes high school without taking pre-reqs. I didn't mind being confused or getting a lower grade. I was gaining exposure, asking questions that excited me. In college, while studying education I articulated a long standing thought I'd had about schools. I realized they were training students to fear failure and unknowing. Taking risks, and admitting gaps in knowledge are usually punished and rarely rewarded in traditional American education. This punishment/reward system around certainty/uncertainty has been something I've consistently resisted in my life, in and out of schools; in and out of the bedroom. Sure it's more efficient to know for certain, but I'm not always looking for efficiency.

Recently I've come to the conclusion that I'm actually uncomfortable with certainty. I avoid it. Certainty, as counterintuitive as this sounds, makes me nervous. I find unknowing, confusion, and the ritual of questioning incredibly comforting. My intuition tells me it's okay to be confused.

I often talk about being a “late bloomer” sexually. Lately I've been feeling critical of this language, not because I think it is particularly inaccurate, only that it is incomplete. As a bookish teen, I grew up in a loving, crowded family where my only real privacy was inside my skull or between pages. I remember staying up til 2 am just staring at the ceiling, reading, thinking, and imagining. I thought about things a lot, got in good cahoots with my brain. Less so with my body, I was nervously curious, but I had no space or privacy to explore this budding curiosity. There were always footsteps upstairs and you heard every movement though the thin wall between my brother's and my basement “rooms”. In the world of my family there was no such thing as a knock on the door. But more than my nervousness and lack of privacy, I, as a female teenager was taught that my sexuality was only allowed to exist in relation to men. I didn't even know women could masturbate until I was 17. What went through my head during my sparse teenage sexual experiences was something along the lines of “I guess I'll try that.”“Is this what I want?” I knew I wanted sensations but I had no idea what exactly. I was inarticulately curious.

These days things are a bit less murky. I have learned that being explicit matters not just when I share my sexuality with others but that I can have a sexuality independent of a partner and even without having a physical actualization. While things are less murky, there is so much I still don't know. In a lot of ways I am still in a place of questioning an interrogating my sexuality. And honestly, I hope to never stop that ritual of questioning.

One thing I AM beginning to feel certain about is owning my uncertainty. Regardless of the consequences. I AM still questioning. And I really mean this in the good old fashioned teenage questioning. I'd be willing to bet more people than just me identify at least their adolescent sexuality as including more questioning than they felt allowed to say at the time. But questioning is not recognized as a valid sexual state to be in. It's looked at as being inbetween, less than.

The idea of being “sexually confused” holds such a strongly negative connotation in our culture that it's often used to invalidate the actual certainty of folks expressing not-straight attractions. I find this disgusting on two levels. First of course that it seeks to define and disparage another person's experience, but secondly that “sexual confusion” is seen as a temporary or transitional state. My sexuality confuses me all the fucking time and I welcome it. I don't want that to stop. Opening to it's uncertainty is what feels natural to me.

Now, just because I am happily confused, doesn't mean I don't believe other people are exactly what they say they are. I do. I deeply respect the expressed sexual certainty of others. Hell I occasionally envy it. It takes time and energy to figure myself out all the freaking time, but it works for me. I often end up feeling like I'm behind that I have to catch up with folks more certain than myself. It's not easy to know when to chase after certainty, but like any protagonist knows, it's not the destination (certainty) that really matters, it's the journey. My journeys into that which I do not know (sexually or otherwise) make me feel like me. I am questioning.