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Week 1 of the 52 week art challenge: an item of clothing. Inspiration image, charcoal sketch and oil painting. (May add detail to the oil painting. Cat and easel shown for scale.)

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Information Commons

Blue is the crayon they were taught to grasp whenever water was called for, and so it was; at least until they adapted their view to fulfill the science requirement. Many of the eyes in our classroom on the lake are blue, as are parts of my own; the same Rayleigh scattering defines how my students see the heterochromia around my pupils as they do when they look out at the shoreline. So how then am I to teach them Ruth McBride’s color of God, to perceive an intrinsic property that is caused by the selective absorption of white light?

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Just Like Starting Over

In “You’ve Got Mail”, Joe Fox types: “Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.” I love Chicago in the fall. Any metropolis that includes leaves and seasons, really. My basic side dons scarves and drinks hot apple cider, while the teacher in me entertains visions of giving Aaron Sorkin-esque rousing speeches in my courses that inspire my students to refer to me as “O Captain, My Captain” in a way that is neither snide nor ironic. While I fall prey to the NYE resolutions cliche like most everyone else who subscribes to a Gregorian calendar, it’s autumn, specifically the start of the fall semester, that inspires me to change. 

Resolved. Resolute. I have lists that include these words magnet-ed to my refrigerator, posted to Facebook and written into day planners and journals. I make these pledges to myself and others to varying degrees of success: I ran (well, mostly speed-walked) a 5k, lost (and regained most of) 75 lbs. and am two years into winning the right to form a union where I teach, but we have yet to win a contract. I wrote poems and posted them to my blog during NaNoPoWriMo, for the bulk of the month anyways. I wrote some flash fiction and drew some owls during my office hours, sporadically at best. I have written roughly 60% of a creative non-fiction memoir and two children’s books, the latter two of which I have also (partially) illustrated. I have masses of poems, in varying stages of completion, saved to thumb drives and Google drives and notebooks, with little to no organization whatsoever. So why can’t I finish what I start? How is that I, a teacher who focuses on process into product, cannot develop a healthy and/or creative habit and make it stick to completion?

On Facebook, I recently shared the following:

“This fall, I will:

• Teach 5 courses with new eyes and new expectations. • Finally read "Infinite Jest". (Hold me to this, [name redacted]) • Establish and keep a habit of writing, making, and eating and moving mindfully. • Turn 37. • Continue my work with Faculty Forward to negotiate a contract for Loyola contingent faculty. • Continue to remain politically active and aware and to practice that in all facets of my life. • Stop apologizing for owning a t.v. and enjoying pumpkin spice everything.”

I shared this because one thing that has worked for me in the past is being accountable to others. I lost the most weight when I was going to Weight Watchers meetings. The techniques and community were of little to no help to me, but knowing I would have to weigh in in front of an employee there, that someone whose name I did not even know would see whether I had gained or lost that week was a huge motivator. I stuck with running - which I am both bad at and detest - because I was enrolled in a group. There were multiple cohorts of runners, one group of run/walkers (which included me) and one group of just walkers. Three weeks in, every run/walker in my section had dropped out, except for me. Though my coach and I never really connected, I dutifully showed up every week to slowly huff and puff down the Lakeshore at her side because the only thing I could think of that would be worse than running would be not living up to my commitment to her. I really love painting, but I haven’t so much as put brush to canvas since the Intro. to Oils community arts course I was taking ended months ago. One Sunday, I was hungover, sleep-deprived and uninspired, but I dragged myself to class and painted for three hours rather than skip out on a classroom full of strangers. So why is it that I will bend over backwards not to disappoint others, but will accept almost any excuse as a reason to break a promise to myself?

The list above has a mix of commitment levels: my partner and I plan to read “Infinite Jest” together, (see also the parenthetical passing off of responsibility to him above) so as long as he stays with it, odd’s are I will, too. My union work and activism are tied to many other people I care for and respect, so I have little doubt I will follow through on both of them thanks to my community. Turning 37 is going to happen whether I resist it or not, so that one’s pretty much in the bag. Teaching is my passion and my livelihood, and I’ve made massive changes to my syllabi this semester, so I will definitely teach in new ways thanks to painting myself into a corner where it will be hard to phone it in or quit in that respect. I may have to work on not feeling badly for consuming T.V. and nutmegy carbohydrates, but I think I can eat my apologies there, too. It’s “Establish and keep a habit of writing, making, and eating and moving mindfully” that has me worried. 

So today, I taught well. I contributed to a cause I believe in and my union, too. I watched T.V., sans apologies, though that’s far easier when it comes to Issa Rae’s “Insecure” than it is when I’m binging guilty pleasure tripe t.v.. I aged one day closer to my birthday. “Infinite Jest” is waiting on my nightstand to have its spine cracked on 9/1. I sweated on the StairMaster for less time than I once could, but more time than I have in a while. I tracked what I ate on my Weight Watchers app and stayed within my boundaries for the day. I wrote this, which doesn’t move any of my existing pieces towards completion, but does count as me practicing the art of applying my butt to the seat and making new words. So there’s today. There’s today, but...

In “Car on a Hill”, Joni Mitchell sings that it always “...seem[s] so righteous at the start/ When there's so much laughter / When there's so much spark”. I’ve been in this honeymoon period with my best intentions before. I’ve lied to myself and betrayed my own trust and given up on myself completely before, too, just as many times. But, as of today, I’m one for one on changing that habit. I think I’m still just optimistic enough to take those odds, because failing again in front of you, dear reader, sounds worse than not trying at all.  

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Release

Do you know how freeing it was to realize that I would never be enough for you? Never be silent enough, tame enough, pretty enough, cool enough, have enough to be less enough for you? That as long as I continued to wake up, take breath, be any size any shape any age any way be any woman, that I was always going to be an affront to you?

That knowledge gave me the permission, no - the compulsion, to do what it had never occurred to me to do before: stop trying.

Stop trying to quiet my voice, my words, my mind. Stop trying to reduce myself, to squeeze and erode into your ever-reductive bindings. To stop apologizing for not knowing how to cook, for not wanting a baby, for loving cute shoes and ugly books, for being single, for being smart, for being happy.

I realized I could stop failing you. I chose to stop failing myself.

To take all the effort I had spent trying to not - not be the angry feminist, not be the bitch, not to raise my hand, not to take that tone, not to take that bite, not to want more, not to object to less, not to upset you – and free that up to be dedicated to being just so.

You are going to see me as the problem, the stereotype, no matter how much I succeed at the contrary because it is my success at anything, even pleasing you, that is your real problem. So why not stop trying to prove you wrong? What if Sisyphus just became the rock? Imagine the time the energy the peace the fire the thoughts the space that could be freed up if I just freed myself of your expectations? It could change everything. I could change everything.

It could be enough, and so could I.

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Unrelated

I have these conversations in my head - with myself, with others - where I edit what I have said/would say. There are often multiple drafts. Sometimes, there are musical numbers. 

So I thought: what if I wrote some of those down? Release is what would happen. No prompts, no forms, just trying to stop the worry that I’m not writing enough with some of the thoughts I’ve been worrying over. No musical numbers, though - yet. 

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Contranym

Of the four men who have said they loved me, three left for the reality or potential of being with someone thinner. On their way out the door, they sounded in turn apologetic and self-consoling and practical and romantic about how they loved my mind and my heart but not my body, by no fault of their own. The fault (it was inferred) and the failing, was shamefully mine. I could be forgiven and pitied for not being prettier, or taller, but never for being fat. That choice, what they assumed and accused was my choice, made the choice for them. They were the victims here, really, of all my potential as well as my lack of delivery. I was small enough for them to fall for quickly, but too big for them to stay with long term. I was sexy enough to chase but not beautiful enough to want to actually catch. As long as I wasn’t fully interested, I was interesting, but if I dared to stop wanting other people I would become unwanted.

I am never enough. I am also too much.

Not queer enough: not Gold Star enough for the lesbians telling their bad bisexual stories at the gay bars where I am treated like a curious tourist; not girl on girl hot enough for the cis-het men I date who look disappointed when I finally give up how many women I have been with and how few are still viable for a threesome now; my dress too Femme but my words too Butch; not fully unicorn opaque nor bi-invisible transparent no matter what the space. A Venn diagram lacking intersectionality; a muddied Pride rainbow.

Not physically enough: the fattest of the thin girls or the thinnest of the fat girls. Not loving myself enough to be fat body positive nor transformed enough to be svelte body proud. Eyebrows raise whether I enter Forever21 and ask for an XL or enter Lane Bryant and ask for a size 0. Voices raise to correct me when I identify as fat but never articulate that I am thin. I am a Weight Watcher’s success story even though I never hit goal weight and just as often a triumph as a disappointment when compared with other versions of my bodily self. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, not on the Big Beautiful Woman or curvy delineations on Tinder.

Not academic enough: too counter culture for the scholars, too mainstream for the literati. Not published enough in tiny hipster presses nor large accessible journals. Too old to be a rising prodigy, too young to be a wizened sage. Not enough tattoos and profanity for the slam stage, too much cleavage and pop culture references for the symposium lecterns. I am the Friend With Benefits (sans benefits) of every faculty, each college unwilling to put a ring on the Manic Pixie Dream adjunct but always willing to give another booty call to teach each fall semester.

I am constantly in regressive progress, always trying to at least give the impression of forward momentum towards an ever-receding horizon line. I never seem to get there, to that razor’s edge of pleasing everyone at the same time: voluptuous in a way that is at once overflowing and chiseled, brilliant in a way that is at once classic and cutting edge, pansexual/panromantic in a way that reflects and refracts the whole of the gender and sexuality spectrum. I am to contain multitudes, to be legion, but in brief.

I am, in many ways, just as in love with the girl I could be, should be, as those who leave me are as well. I refuse to commit to the woman I am because, honestly, I think I could do better. I just have to convince her of that.

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Writer’s need muses, gadflies, idols. Roxane Gay is all of those things to me as a reader, a writer, an educator, an academic, a feminist and a queer woman in a fat body. 

So greatful that I got to see her/hear her tonight. So happy to feel that “I have to get home and write this” feeling again. So proud of this piece. Thank you, Roxane. Thank you. 

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I Spy

Something beginning with the letter D: dejected, deprived, desolate, despairing, desperate, diminished, disappointed, discouraged, disillusioned, disinterested, distressed, distrustful, dominated, doubtful, done.

Something metallic: the key on threadbare yarn around your neck, the logo on the back of your Jordan’s, pencil lead, 9MM semiautomatic handguns, followed by .40 caliber and .45 caliber semiautomatics – these are used for over half the crimes in the city, and one out of three of you know where the one is in your home.

Something blue: my dress, which you said you liked when I stepped over you to get to the main entrance buzzer this morning. I thought that was a good sign. Now I wonder if you were looking up my skirt.

Something winding: your wrists, your feet, your tongue, your mind; a cat’s cradle of movement, pivoting. A student like a hummingbird, suspended in constant motion. The way you twisted your hip to mock my limp. Then your friend said: “No, the fuckin’ bitch walks like this.” His impersonation was more accurate, but yours got more laughs.

Something soft: the pads of her fingers - touching, counting through the problems as she sits alone.  

Something tall: expectations. The teacher who said: “Tell me if you have any issues with him, him or him,” before walking away without giving me his name, or classroom number, or the identities of any of the children he just listed.

Something square: length times width times height, base times height, side plus side plus side. The door you slammed on me and a classmate. How his punch landed as he screamed for me to get off him. The table the two of you then went and sat at, side by side.

Something missing: a wedding ring on my hand. You notice, and say: “No wonder you’re not married. You’ll never get a husband you fat, ugly bitch.” I will think of a few great comebacks for this later on, and one really good one right then, in the moment. I take pride both in having not said them and in how much they would have burned if I did.

Something cold: Comfort. My tears, pooling in the rims of my sunglasses on the bus ride home, which I made sure you did not see.

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Yesterday I had one of the most emotionally, mentally and physically challenging days in the classroom that I have ever had in 15 years of teaching. This “I Spy” prompt seemed a good vehicle to examine and unpack it. I can’t say I found the process especially cathartic, but I am happy with the product and feel it helped me gain perspective. 

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Unreliable Narrator

Jackson –

Per·spec·tive (pərˈspektiv): noun. A particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view. I thought you and any voyeuristic Pony Express boy steaming this correspondence open for kicks and giggles might need the dictionary definition of the above, as it doesn’t seem to be found in your Shamus to English translation of the OED. Your Clix o Flex only seems able to manually focus in on the foreground, letting everything surrounding it blur out into black – especially backdrop like me.

My fingers have gnarled themselves into hag’s claws from translating your dictation at the Smith-Corona Clipper with the L that always sticks and totaling up the tabs for your billable hours on the Remington Rand. If you had to pay for half of the Cutex-polished nails I’ve broken playing out the ballad of my frustration and heartbreak on these keys you’d be out a berry roll in addition to being morally bankrupt.

How many roundheels have I heard clacking up the stairs, the pomp and circumstance clarion call of the damsel in distress? How much cotton have I stuffed in my ears to tune out those same heels getting swept off their feet once inside your inner sanctum? My palms are worn smooth from taking their herringbone trenches, cut just this side of the L-85 restrictions. My eyes know just how to lower the lights so I can blind myself to the silhouette you two cut behind your half-light door emblazoned with your name on the frosted glass. Yes, I know my role: to play the second banana to her forbidden fruit, to stay in my shallow steno pool while you drown in the heart she pours out to you.

One should never assume they’re getting the whole story from the leading man. His hands are too full to write up the truth. That task (like everything else) falls to the ingénue, who no one falls for in the end.

-          Your Harlow

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30 Days of Brave

1. Make more (draw, write).

2. Eat mindfully.

3. Move more. 

I’m back. Same intention, new challenge gadfly. 

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Today, we pledge our allegiance to the collective liberation of all our communities. Sign the #PledgeOfLiberation. http://thndr.me/Zguvwz

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Trying to find something to motivate myself and I found this little line from Van Gogh

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Ill Met by Moonlight

Jackson –

I wasn’t really me, before we met. Sometimes it takes someone else to create your truth, to write you into being like a narrative or a trust. Jean was just a hat check girl at Chez Paree, hoping to hold Lena Horne’s mink stole as she entered the Shatz. I couldn’t even dream big enough to think myself an understudy for the Adorables, though my getaway sticks had drawn the eyes of the Horn & Hardart Automat Company more than twice. To say I had a surname would have either meant I was born lucky or married well, neither of which I’d managed by that winter of ‘42.  

The cold was so sharp that even the Active Duties and the Able Grables were layered like cake. The Anchor Clankers could barely dig the frozen clams out of their GI wide legs to pay for a jelly roll they had to trust was sweet under all that gabardine and fur. I had just returned to my post after trying to powder off my freckles for the umpteenth time that night, and all that was in my foreseeable future was watching the rug cutters cook with helium until my clock was punched. Then, like a bad penny, you rolled in.

Should I lie, flatter you, let the music swell in the background in the fair foyer where we set our scene? You’d press two fingers to my wrists and know I was whistling Dixie on the beam in a minute, so I won’t. I was solid gone, my eyes too full of bias-cut silk, Bakelite, Catalin and Celluloid to make room for anything else. I was too dizzy to know that it was all cut glass and Vermeil, but that surface was more real than any salt of the Earth I had tasted back home. Once I noticed you, I assumed you were a G-Man or an Ofay and almost broke a nail pressing the buzzer under the desk as hard as I could. But the High Pillow snapped his cap if you cried wolf too often, so I offered my hand for your trench and hoped you were just a Jeff come in to get out of the cold.

“Still in the silent film era, eh Harlow?” you teased. You hit closer to home than you knew – I was terrified to open my jaw in case a hayseed fell out. Twists were meant to be seen, not heard, but curiosity got this kitty to bite.

“Harlow?” I asked, trying to arch my brow the way I practiced in the bathroom mirror every morning.

You reached for my brass ID bracelet, the one I kept partially out of nostalgia and mostly due to the clasp being stuck fast. The cherry of your cigarette was so close to my palm that I feared you’d set my life line on fire. “Jean,” you read. “You don’t look like a Jean.”

“Neither did Harlean Carpenter,” said I.

Then a Gunsel slipped and drenched me in his Manhattan, and I was baptized in rye.

-          Your Harlow

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Did I stay on prompt? Not in the least. Did I write something new, from scratch, not cutting a single corner? Yes! Sometimes a room of your own, and the headiness that comes from waking up with your cheek on a pile of graded term papers, works alchemy. 

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Stained Glass Cabin Offers Colorful Oasis Hidden in the Woods

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Serrated Edge

Every morning, I score my tangerines

in a cross, not to ward off evil

but to make something                       (for which I have a compromised desire)

yield more easily to me.