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Intersectionality.

I’ve been thinking a lot about intersectionality lately, a word the right bloviates as hate-speak at my feminist-queer-Jewish-New-York-living-body. Its image appears as a Venn diagram: concentric circles of identity, story, culture, race, religion, you name it, that are within each of us. “The personal is political,” says writer Hannah Arendt, and so I have turned a more focused eye on intersectional aspects within me. The contradictions, the privilege I enjoy as a white, middle-class, well-educated woman, and the misogyny I also experience daily as a woman. I am not particularly special, but I am the only example I feel comfortable writing about to give a clear idea of what’s been in my mind.

My father is Jewish, my mother is Christian, and for my entire life they have meditated and studied many forms of Buddhism, beginning with a teacher named Thich Nhat Hanh. I know very little about my father’s family and their Judaism. My Jewishness growing up consisted of bagels with lox on Christmas morning, Grandma Rose’s horror at what she perceived to be my “cross-shaped” earrings, and an immense capacity to imagine the worst happening at any moment. What I do know is that my great-grandfather immigrated to the United States sometime in the early 20th century, I believe in 1913, during the worst of the pogroms in Odessa. During my free trial on ancestry.com (One of those white privilege perks that we have an ancestry.com to use. Where do my black friends go for their history?) I found three US census forms dating from 1920-1930 that showed Russia, Poland, and Romania as possible countries of origin for Louis Liebman, his wife Rebecca, and their four children, including my grandfather Charles Liebman. Bits and pieces of stories I have picked up from various family members indicate that Louis was a rather nasty bit of business. In my own work dealing with generational trauma, I can almost feel the darkness emanating from my great-grandfather, a sense of failure. Louis Liebman had been a shopkeeper in the Old Country, so the legend goes, and was brought to the US via land grants in rural Connecticut purchased by Lord Rothschild and given to Jews fleeing the pogroms, where they would make their homes as tobacco farmers.

Apparently Louis made a terrible farmer, and his rage and bitterness swelled to the point of forbidding my grandfather to attend high school in order to work, despite young Charles’ love of learning. To give you an idea of the extreme disconnect and pain on my father’s side, we only learnt in 2016 (and by we I mean me, my father, and his brother and sister) that my great-grandmother Rebecca had committed suicide after the family settled in the United States. I was twenty-eight, my dad, uncle, and aunt in their sixties learning this tragic and essential part of our history. I don’t even know for sure the date that Rebecca died. As an adult, I have become more of a practicing Jew and am endlessly fascinated with Judaism, primarily in an effort to reclaim this part of my spiritual and familial DNA. The knowledge of my ancestors’ Jewish faith, how they practiced if it all, their stories, are all lost. The more I learn about epigenetics, and delve deeper in Buddhist, Jewish, and shamanic knowledge, the more I feel certain that the trauma of persecution, assimilation, and lost identity my family experienced has indelibly marked my family and our collective spirit in deep and varied ways.

My mother’s family feels like old money Revolutionary War heroes compared to my Jewish patriarchal displacement and relatively recent arrival in the United States. The specifics like dates are equally hazy, but my mother’s line is descended from English and German immigrants who arrived in America in the 1840s (or 1830s) and settled in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with the Moravian Church. Founded in the fifteenth century and one of the oldest Protestant denominations in the world, the Moravians’ beliefs were quite similar to those of the Quakers, with an emphasis on community, music, and a belief in the divinity of the self with less deference to a minister-figure. The Moravians had been established in Winston-Salem since 1766, and my mother’s ancestors were active in both community and church life, founding Salem Academy, an all-girls school that sparked my intention to go to boarding school. During a 7th grade visit to North Carolina over Christmas break, I remember attending Christmas Eve “lovefeast” service at the Moravian church, a beautiful white building still standing. The blissfully short yet music-filled service concluded with the congregation sitting together holding hands, then literally breaking bread together. I munched the traditional soft buns and drank the sweet milky coffee and felt utterly at peace.

As an adult, though, as my own wokeness in the aftermath of police brutality and Black Lives Matter developed, I questioned for the first time something so nakedly obvious: Had my coffee drinking, Southern school founding ancestors owned slaves? The fact that I was nearly thirty before it even occurred to me to consider that question is evidence that white privilege is in all of us, even the radically liberal ones. “Can’t be,” I thought to myself anxiously, “the Moravians were so chill! They were like the Quakers in so many ways, and they were abolitionists! Can’t have been slave owners.” Immediately I Googled “Moravian Church owning slaves North Carolina.” I was initially delighted to learn that the state of North Carolina had more free black people residing there than were in the entire South. Even better when I read that Moravians believed that while individuals may have different stations on the earthly realm, that all Moravians were equal under God, and in 18th century Winston-Salem, white and black Moravians worshipped and were buried in the same church. My moral superiority bubble lasted only an instant longer, as I continued to read that the Moravian Church did not believe in their members owning personal slaves, only the church itself. Apparently the South grew more deeply attached to the institution of slavery, and by the early 19th century the Moravian egalitarianism had faded. African Americans soon were required to sit in a balcony separate from the white Moravians, then had to be buried in the Strangers Graveyard far away from the white God’s Acre cemetery, and finally forced to have their own segregated black Moravian church. The memory of the sweet lovefeast coffee I had consumed turned to ash in my mouth. This is all of the information I know thus far. It is possible that my ancestors did own slaves, it is possible that they did not. It is certain that the religious institution that was such a large part of their lives did.

So. Bitter traumatized Jew on one side, Southern potential slave-owners on the other. Descended from terrified refugees persecuted for religious beliefs, and descended from a genteel people whose religious beliefs excused and allowed them to profit off of the subjugation of a human being. I use myself as a starting place to make a point. I believe these inherent contradictions in ourselves are what unite, not divide us. There is no place on earth (except perhaps New Zealand. Can we all move to New Zealand?) that is not built on generations of bloodshed, subjugation, and displacement. This act of looking inside ourselves is just the first step of a larger, much more crucial process: the act of recognizing the oneness we share with all living things. We are each made of the dust of the bones of our ancestors, each of us descended from people who were conquerors and oppressed, and within each of us are those concentric circles: in my case “Jewish” “female” “slavery supporters” “white” “feminist” “writer” “wife” et. al living in diametric opposition, suspended animation. Look at your own history for a moment; I am convinced that in your own unique, divine flavor, these opposites live inside you, too. Even the source of all of my fear these days, 45 cannot wall up, shower off, or alternative fact them away for himself.

Shema yisrael! Adonai Eloheinu adonai echad. This is the most important prayer in Judaism, one that observant children are taught to say first thing upon arising in the morning, before going to sleep, and the last words they say before death. My husband served in the Israeli army and told me stories of soldiers in the last Lebanon War screaming the Shema as they launched themselves on top of a grenade to shield their fellow soldiers. I am not a rabbi, but my un-nuanced translation is  “Hear Israel! Our Lord Our God is One.” I have been taking Hebrew for a year, and am falling in love with the brevity and poetic simplicity of the language. It is evocative in a way that makes me believe in the presence of Spirit manifested in words. A whole tradition of mystical Judaism called Kabbalah explores this in depth. I love the Shema because it expresses the crucial idea of self-examination, and the importance of intersectionality: we are all one. It is an idea that I see beginning to mobilize and unify the resistance. Our collective liberation is personal liberation. Our self-care, as Queen Audre Lorde wrote, is our radical act of resistance. The unwillingness to accept intersectional, radically different parts of ourselves only serves to enforce the walls, the us versus them, the sense of superiority towards the “other,” when in actuality it is only evidence of a deeper, divine separation within us.

Resist. We must resist together, and be as one. At one with our neighbor, at one with our planet and all the life it holds, and at one with ourselves. We have the space to contain an infinitude. The infinitude within us, our different stories and ideas and cultures and cooking styles and religions are assets to share with the world. Let us unite, and in uniting, use what they seek to divide us.

Shabbat shalom, Inshallah, Namaste. In Peace.

[fuploudly-blog]

Post-Taxes Filing Blues.

“Well, what can you do?” Sherry from Arkansas asked me over the phone. Her voice was conspiratorial and warm, like a girlfriend.

I sat in my winter-bound apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, looking at the ice-glazed streets, thinking.

“I mean, I want to be paying no more than $160, $170 per month, so maybe…let’s say…”

“Would you say $24,000 a year in income is more appropriate?” Sherry prompted.

I smiled. “Yeah, yeah $24,000 feels about right.”

“Great!” Sherry enthused. “Now that gets you down to..$159.61 after your monthly tax credit of $289.”

This was back in January of 2015. I had just finished my first year of Obamacare, and was re-enrolling in my plan. Sherry was the customer service rep that answered my call. We immediately bonded on the phone over our desire to be in South Beach and not in any type of cold whatsover. I got off the call feeling satisfied.

I had no idea that I was getting royally fucked.

You see, what Sherry and I were negotiating was how much I could pay in health insurance. Initially my projected 2015 income was around $36,000. Even with a “tax credit” from Obamacare, I would be paying nearly $400 a month in insurance. When I balked at that amount, Sherry and I got down to negotiating. Sherry understood me. She thought that $400 was a ridiculous amount too. Thus my annual projected income kept getting trimmed to around $24,000 per year. 

“Sherry was so cool,” I told my friends. “My lady, that answered when I called the exchange? We negotiated and got it all figured out. Sherry’s my girl.”

I am partly to blame for getting fucked. I didn’t understand or do the research to realize what we were talking about, that if my 2015 income turned out to be more than what I had projected (about $13,000 more at the end of the day), then I would be paying the difference out of my return. Meaning that after a year of five waitressing jobs and back breaking hours, that my total federal return was a whopping $90.

$90!!!!

So yeah, it’s partly my fault. But look at the great options I was given in this phenomenal country of ours:

-be honest about my annual income, and be stuck with a crappy insurance that even from the “Marketplace,” I COULD NOT AFFORD AT ALL.

-fudge my income, get a crappy insurance that I could barely pay as is, and then get my federal return so gouged that is it is less of a return and more of a mild-u turn/cul-de-sac.  

-choose to not pay exorbitant prices for a health insurance that by definition sucks balls (I’m 28! Let’s take some chances) and then be penalized by the federal government for not having a ball-sucking insurance at all.

These are the choices that our country gives us for health care. And I am so much luckier than most. I do have a full time job that does pay pretty well. I am a citizen so I am legally documented to be able to take part in the “exchange.” And yet these options are so laughably inexcusably fucking bad.

I am paying off my student loans. I have a mild amount of credit card debt. I am saving for my wedding in the fall. I give to charities. I donate $10 a month to Bernie Sanders in the hopes that my reality will not be my children’s. I can’t walk into The Strand without buying books. I eat out occasionally. Sometimes at work I don’t want to eat pizza and I upgrade my family meal to salad for $10.

My point is I think I am pretty solidly in the middle of financial intelligence. I don’t spend extravagantly, and I am fully grinding it out in New York City. And yet somehow, the game still feels rigged.

[fuploudly-blog]

No Words.

Today around 5 pm my boyfriend and I left my apartment in Sunnyside and walked to the bus stop immediately outside my house.

On the ground right under the pole with the bus schedule was something bizarre. Two phones lay on the ground, next to a purse, a white bath and bodyworks bag with a notebook inside, a plastic bag with a gallon bottle of Mountain Dew, and a small portable speaker.

"Something's wrong," I said immediately. "Why are these phones sitting out? They're not even in the purse."

We stared at them.

"It's not going to explode is it?" I half-joked. In the current terror-saturated media environment, even terrorists bombing a quiet bus stop in Queens seems plausible.

"Nah, it's not wired to anything," he responds.

"Something's wrong. This looks like someone was abducted, baby."

"Yeah, this is wrong."

I pick up one of the phones, an iPhone. The screen flashes to tons of missed calls and texted. Missed calls from "House." Texts like "Where are you?" "Por qué no estás en casa?"

"Try calling someone," my boyfriend prods.

I press the button for house and a woman answers in Spanish.

"Hi, I'm, I don't know who this is, I found this phone-"

-Hold on, hold on.

I hear her call for someone, catch the word "anglesa."

"Hello?" A boy answers.

"Hi. I'm outside a bus stop on 48th Street and Skillman in Sunnyside. I just found this phone on the ground, along with a purse and a bag. I tried calling to see who it was."

"Yeah, that's my younger sister Stephanie's phone. Oh god. Okay, hold on. I'm coming. Where did you say you were?"

We hang up, and I look at my boyfriend.

"This is really bad."

"Yeah."

"That's really scary. He says he's coming."

At this point our bus pulls up. We look at each other and wave the driver past.

The other phone rings, some Galaxy-Android thing. Eitan answers this time.

"Hi. My girlfriend and I just found this phone-"

"I see you. Are you in the orange jacket?"

"Yes."

Eitan hangs up, looking confused.

"This guy is here, I think he's turning around at the other bus stop."

"Is it her brother?"

"I don't know."

A car pulls up, and an affable looking young Hispanic guy rolls his window down.

"Hey, are you her brother?"

He looks at us confused.

"No, I just got a call from my friend to come here and get him, he left his phone?"

As we're standing trying to figure this out another young Hispanic guy bursts from the building.

Dressed all in black. He sprints to the window and starts talking to his friend, frantic. Deliberately trying to keep us from hearing. Something about her- she's sick. He looks terrified.

We ask what's going, what's going on.

He turns to face us. He is sweaty, that glisten that comes from drinking. We smell liquor. His face is flushed.

"Look, it's my friend. She's had a little too much to drink. I carried her downstairs."

"Then why is all of her stuff out here?"

"I carried her down."

"We need to call the cops," I say. "If she's sick, she needs an ambulance." I didn't like him immediately. He was so obviously terrified and trying to keep something secret.

"We want to help."

He looks at us. "You want to help?"

"Yes," my boyfriend and I shout.

We follow him into the building. "She's pretty big, so that's why I need help. I couldn't carry everything."

How do you act when you encounter a rapist? What are you supposed to do? All I know is that I walked into the lobby and I saw two older Hispanic women. One was talking on the phone, giving an address to the ambulance. The other was cradling a girl in her lap.

She was not pretty big. She was tiny. Pretty in the way young teenage girls are, adult enough to incite lewd gestures, young enough that her chest was still flat and her waist a child's width.

Her legs lolled uselessly. Her eyes were half open. Her pants were unbuttoned.

Everyone was talking loudly.

"I called an ambulance" the woman on the phone calls to us.

The boy rushes to the girl. "She's fine, I'm going to take her home."

He starts to tug at her legs. The woman cradling her holds on to her shoulders for dear life, screaming at him.

I scream at him to let her go. The ladies scream at . Eitan pushes him off of the girl. He goes back to her legs and tugs harder.

Her shirt pushes up and I see her small dark nipple, a chocolate eggplant aerolae, and my heart breaks. Her skinny torso twists about being pulled in two directions. I feel from my uterus up through my heart into my throat this moan, this wail of violation choking me.

Eitan pushes him off again, harder, and he stands back.

Two cops emerge. We scream, "He was trying to take her. He didn't want her to go to the ambulance. He says she's had too much to drink, I think she has alcohol poisoning."

Two cops become 10. They back the guy up far away from her. They don't let the friend go either. He looks at us with hate and panic and fear.

I see all of her bags inside the building now. The plastic bag with the Mountain Dew is missing now.

Two female paramedics take her into the ambulance.

Most of the cops aren't exactly sure what's going on. We tell as many of them as we can exactly what happened. At least 3 of them get the full weight of what we're saying. "Oh. Okay. Wow. Thank you guys."

They shake our hands.

The lead cop questioning the guy comes out.

"Were her pants unbuttoned when you guys saw her?"

We nod. My vision blurs slightly and I burst out "Look, for what it's worth, I think she was raped."

He shrugs. "No, I think she just had a lot to drink."

"No. She wasn't wearing a bra, her pants were unbottoned. The guy didn't want her to go to the hospital, we had to pull him off her. He lied and said the guy that came to get her was her brother."

"Wow." The cop nodded. "Okay. Thank you."

He raped her. He raped her, baby. I kept repeating that to my boyfriend as we stood in the lobby. He raped her. He raped her. Baby, he raped her while we were in my living room smoking a joint and contemplating a nap and discussing how excited we were to go out and give a deposit on our new apartment. He raped her.

There can be no coherence in this missive. No introduction and concluding paragraphs. My brain cannot turn up a neat and powerful thesis statement that binds all together.

All I feel is that choked wail in my throat. See her dark nipple. See his sweaty, drunk rapist face.

I am certain me, my boyfriend, and the two ladies in the building who also didn't know her saved her life. When you see something, don't just say something.

Do.

[fuploudly-blog]

Grit My Teeth

I have an hour and 45 minutes left to write. 

I did have 5 hours. But after doing laundry, and eating gingerbread cookies my roommate made, and talking to my dad on the phone, and surfing Facebook until my brain rots, I don't have that kinda time anymore. 

But I told myself I would write something today. 

I am now debating a nose ring. My boyfriend is Israeli and highly encourages it. I browse curly-haired friends with nose rings on Facebook, trying to acertain if I will still be me with it. Will I look as much of a Nora with a nose ring, as Lisa looks like a Lisa with hers, or Anna like an Anna. I look back at photos of my 18 year old self in college with a nose ring. My best friend and I pose for pictures utterly wasted, and my then ring glitters like a shiny pimple. 

I do this all the time. Frantically decide I need to get a tattoo or piercing, stampede over my Jewish guilt and anxiety of modifying my body in any way, and just do it. I scan the Internet, spend useless mind energy thinking about it, and then out of utter exhaustion, I have to stop any tattoo considerations at all. 

Now I have only an hour and 29 minutes. 

I get into these patterns when I'm stressed. Instead of plumbing my brain's creative depths, I obsess over my appearance. I had a lot of piercings as a teenager, and 3 (hidden) tattoos in quick succession between 18 and 19 (Yep). I want to change, or do something different. Feel the high that comes only from modifying your appearance. 

I don't want to be writing about this stuff at all. I want to be working on a screenplay. I want to be back in the game organizing a fundraiser for my first feature film (DEAR GOD CAN I JUST HAVE SOME FUCKING MONEY PLEASE). I want to be self-publishing cool books of poetry on Beyonce and angst. I want to be writing about real things. 

Not the brain spasms. Not this clumsy writers block. Not anything that reflects the tired and defeated feeling I have from only being a waitress for the last month and a half. 

An hour left. 

I'm rereading Wild by Cheryl Strayed. I loved Strayed's Dear Sugars collection. Wild on the first read gagged me with a little too much EMPOWERED WOMEN YEAHHHHHHHH Oprah. This time around though, Wild is awesome. I fantasize about walking the Pacific Crest Trail myself, but I have no trainwreck of a life to escape from. Plus I wouldn't even get to write about it. Maybe the Appalachian Trail? I used to feed the AT hikers when I was in elementary school in Vermont. They'd amble past our giant village green/school playground, and stop to barter with us. Gushers or Oreos were powerful currency. They were friendly, and stunk, and were as regular a part of our daily lives as snow plows and recess. 

Maybe it's just about getting started. Doing. I'm doing right now, aren't I? Doing. Writing. Doing. Gritting my teeth. 

I decided not to smoke weed for a month. Or at least 3 weeks. 

48 minutes left. 

It means something right? The gritting of teeth? The memorization of different wine varietals so then I can become a captain and make more money at my waitressing job? So then I can pour money into making my first movie so that god willing one day if I am lucky I can make my money by writing and filming the words that come out of my brain and not by crumbing and marking for the second course? 

Gritting my teeth. 

I have forty minutes. Maybe the piercing place does walk-ins. 

[fuploudly-blog]

An Open Letter to Daughter Salt & Pepper

Dear Daughter,  

Your parents came into the coffee shop where I work as a waitress. Their last names include a condiment, but for purposes of this letter, I’ll call them Mr. and Mrs. Salt and Pepper. I saw a McGill sticker (our alma mater) on your dad’s bag, and asked if he went there. He said his daughter (you) did. We launched into fun small talk about McGill, what an incredible education I had gotten, about Montreal: best bagels, Satan’s frozen-asshole arctic winters. You had just graduated this past June, Mr. Salt said. 

Then Mrs. Pepper piped in. 

“What school were you in?” 

-Faculty of Arts. 

“Our daughter too! What was your major?”

-I was a Cultural Studies major, basically a film major. 

“That explains the coffee shop.” 

BAM. Your mom went right for the jugular.

Never mind she knew nothing about me. 

Never mind that it is pretty fucking rude to talk to anyone that way. 

Never mind that it is another example of how some people can see their servers as sub-human forms to bring them more half and half, and therefore it is okay to dismiss their entire life as a mistake. 

I’m talking directly to you now, Daughter Salt & Pepper, Class of McGill University 2013, Major and Life Unknown. 

I hope you are lucky enough to work in a restaurant doing what you love. 

I left a 9-5 that I worked my first year and a half in New York because I was soul-suckingly miserable and broke out in hives because I didn’t have time to do what I cared about. 

I chose to leave that job and be paid significantly less in order to pursue my dreams of screenwriting and filmmaking.

Actually in my first year off from that 9-5, a feature film I wrote was shortlisted by a little thing called Sundance, one of 40 that made it out of 2,000. I had tried to apply to that same thing the year before, and instead watched the deadline pass in tears as I struggled to format an annual report for my boss. I am fundraising now for said film, and hope to direct it in the fall. I have time to write, time to play guitar, time to bike all over this gorgeous insane New York City.

I am passionately happy, is my point, Daughter SP. I get tired waiting tables, yes. But here’s the thing: As much as what your mom said was cunty and rude, I get it. I am the Ghost of Christmas Future to her. 

“Shit!” she thinks to herself. “We sent our daughter to go to one of the top 35 universities in the world and it’s not a safeguard against her having customers press used tissues into her hands when clearing their omelets?!!”*

I would gently remind your mom that most of the people working in food service here in New York City are artists. We are the future Redfords and Julianne Moores and Eddie Vedders and Kara Walkers. The music and art and movies that your mom enjoys comes from us, from the people before us, and from the people after. I take pride in working a day job that forces me to practice humility, compassion, patience, and a sense of humor. A job that so many of my artist brothers and sisters have done and will continue to do in order to have freedom to create and express their truths. 

My parents were scared too, Daughter, Still are, though they tell me about it less. But they believe not just in me and my dreams and abilities, but in my capacity to create a fulfilling life for myself. Maybe for you that life is in an office, Daughter SP. Or in a school. Or on a farm. Or at home caring for your children. Or in a coffee shop. 

Good luck, I’m sure you don’t need it. 

*Yes, this happens. Please tip your server.