my bad.

“Settle matters quickly with your adversary... Do it while you are still together on the way... "
 
So I got a little huffy with someone today, and while they were being a little ridiculous, I totally didn't treat them with the respect that I should treat even the most absurd people with to the point where even Randal said I screwed up. It was that stupid. So on top of feeling like a hypocrite (because I've been known to call out my comrades in customer service on this and students who get into arguments with our more mentally unhinged regulars), I feel foolish and jerky and everything I can't stand in other people. I know this is probably overreaction and not the end of the world, but I hate when I do this and upon regretting what I say, I apologize, and own up to my lack of kindness. This goes unheeded and so hopes of resolution are at the very best deferred.

Do not judge, or you too will be judged.  For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?  How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?  You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.


Even though this isn't a big deal in the great scheme of things, I still feel awful. I don't want to deal with Powers That Be on this though it may not even reach them (though she seems like the type that'd go to the top). For all the thousands of interactions where I'm a class act and then some, it's going to be That One Time I Fuck Up Every Three Years that overshadows all other things.The Powers That Be tend to turn every molehill into Everest, especially when image is tantamount. Being so low in the hierarchy, it's hard enough when it's your word against someone higher up in the foodchain when you're in the right, let alone when you're dead wrong.

"...Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry,  because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires..." 

 I wonder how many less hurt feelings and frayed dynamics there would be if I just learned how to shut the hell up once in awhile, keeping those thoughts in check. It's hard not to extrapolate this into some of the other relationships I've had where one the or another has happened and the tongue-lashing begins. Most of the time I regret what I have said more than what I haven't. I just hate when things get volcanic. 

So yeah, Reflective Powers... learning to not let it happen again, to be more gracious than automatic, to treat others the way I want to be treated, and not beat myself up too badly for not being perfect all the time. It's hard as hell, but at least it's not the end of the world like some things could be.


 

a new kind of sameness

So I've been trying to figure out why I get a little bothered at the whole gentrification new urbanista movement people, because yeah, cities that actually work with viable transportation options and relatively safe streets and whatnot are good things, but the general attitude sometimes gets a little grating, kind of the secular reverse of the people I grew up with who somehow thought they were more virtuous because they lived in the country because that's where real life and the good people were.

I shouldn't be so hard on them, because I had my time when youthful idealism was tempered by the realities of the occasional driveby shooting, the hookers on the corner, getting hollered at from every other front porch and having invasive comments made about the color of my lady parts, having to pick routes to places based on which corners were sketchy.

Even if the neighborhood is walkable and there's lots of places where people go out to eat, the population has never been dense enough that I felt safe walking alone after sunset. There were vast swaths of dead zones between one area of development and another, and enough robberies and rapes within a few blocks of me, and a drive-by shooting two doors down that it only cemented a fortress mentality on my part that I'm only beginning to shake myself free of. It's what happens when you live alone and you get accosted for bunga-bunga when you're in your driveway and it's painfully obvious that there's no one looking out for you.


In conversation the other night with some friends who still live over there, we were wrestling with the implications raised by a block club meeting one of them attended where the local folks and the development corporation locked horns over what to do with a stretch of streetscape. I've always kind of liked the way it looked, with the handpainted signage and the little enterprises that go in and out, the dilapidated 19th century facades and such... antique stores and all-night diners, ethnic grocery stores and auto parts shops and so on, though others see it differently and would rather supplant the barbershops and used car lots with art studios and other such enterprises.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but come on now, young white people.There are a lot of vacant storefronts, but that area is one of the few stretches that does have small locally owned businesses that serve the surrounding area. And here's the thing, barbershops and hair braiding salons  may not cater to you, but it's a regular thing for other people. As is the Vietnamese market, and the Puerto Rican bakeries, the Lebanese social clubs and the auto parts shops. Most people can't afford Priuses so they stop at the used car lot. Some people have kids and can't ride their bikes everywhere.

If you're going on about "food deserts" because there's no Trader Joe's or food co-op down there, you obviously haven't been inside any of the ethnic markets down there that sell rice and beans and fresh vegetables very cheaply and sell the kind of things that you'd pay dearly for at World Market or Whole Foods but it's within walking distance. I know most of you haven't been there because the people who work there ask why I, as a white person, shop there, because either few or none do.


But this is the thing that gets me. All these people talk about how they want to live in the city because there's life there and it's not bland and generic and cookie-cutter like the cracker suburbias they grew up in. But what I see a lot of these people doing is just trying to impose a different kind of sameness in their new neighborhoods, it has to be the right kind of people into the right kind of things. Instead of big box stores, it's little boutiques or whatever, instead of Dairy Queen, it's yuppie ice cream. But every "art district" or "restaurant district" pretty much looks exactly the same. Maybe the period of the architecture is different, but it's the same aesthetic repeated over and over again everywhere.

For all of its "funkiness" and "uniqueness" and "localness" every single gentrified urban area looks like this, at least from what I've seen in DC, Buffalo, Boston, Columbus.Any semblance of local culture is ultimately co-opted and wiped out, maintaining only a patina of grit to make it seem authentic, when it's just as much a manufactured culture as what its acolytes rail against. Not only that, but it's damn expensive for even us arty white folks who don't have swank jobs. If your dream is to sell organic cupcakes to the masses, that's cool and go you, but remember that there's a whole rest of the world out there that can't afford such things or may not care that they exist.

solitudinous

I don't want to sit next to him on the bus and hear about "those people" on "those bus lines" going into "those neighborhoods" because I know some of "those people" and I've even hung out in some of "those neighborhoods" because the places that "those buslines" go to may not be as nice as where I live, but there are good people there too that I love deeply. I wonder if I should invest in headphones, not so much maybe to listen to tunes so much as to tune out unwanted interactions.

I come home to peacefulness, awakening to a second wind, of no longer being in thrall to a computer screen  under the cold flourescent glow, of changing into old jeans and the comfortable grungy layers of baggy t-shirt, thermal, hoodie, flannel, to take a walk to accomplish sundry errands as the sun sets, and curling up on the couch once more with reheated leftovers, the theological writings of Hans Kung, and the Screaming Trees on the stereo, to spend the evening playing guitar, rediscovering the fretboard, and painting.


I know that we're all selfish by nature, but I fear the ease with which self-absorption comes when living alone. I vacillate between relishing the solitude and the peace of returning to my own domain, of not having to step on anyone's toes, the ability to create that flourishes when I'm alone most often. I have neighbors above and below but no roommates anymore, and I realized how for years I've lived this constant tiptoe dance of consideration and maintaining the equilibrium, which are good things, but how so often I excused their unreasonableness and took undue culpa upon myself.

I do, however, miss the sense of community that comes from shared space, of the cross-pollination of each others' friendships, of eating dinner with someone else, sharing the leftover riches after work functions, the ways that my world cracked open and broadened so naturally during those years because of everyone who crossed our doorstep. We felt safer because we knew that someone would notice if we went missing, we could invite people up without it being weird, and being able to mutually vent after stressful work weeks was cathartic. I miss these things, even when there were times I wished everyone would just go away, or maybe one of them felt that way. I miss the sharing profoundly.

One of my friends, a more idealistic soul who gets arrested in front of the White House and invites me to events that involve watching documentaries, wants to do the communal living Dorothy Day kind of thing with some other younger folk, which I think is wonderful, I really do. If it was the medieval times, I probably would have ended up in a convent, due to my ambivalence about coupling, and I love to see people come together with their resources and visions. I just can't bring myself to do it now. Comfort? Complacency? Attempting to maintain my sanity after a crazy season of life? Fear of the drama that inevitably comes when we become too familiar? I'm against rugged individualism in theory but in my own domain, it's what I practice, and that bothers me.