Personal

Yeah! Bejata is back!

I first wrote about Bejata back in 2006 but Bernard is back from a blog hiatus, so it's time for an update.

Bernard has one of the most corageous, provocative yet heart-warming series written on any blog, Black Gay Men at Midlife.

If it is not easy being a gay black man in America, it can be twice as hard for those reaching middle age. Bernie with this series seeks to expose those stories but what he also does is to expose the misconceptions, hypocrisies and ageism that exist within the black gay community and use that opportunity to start a dialogue about "what's next".

Check out the whole series. Another favorite? His sports archives. You're going to have a hell of a blog ride.

I am doing a bit of personal fundraising to cover the expenses for repairing my computer. In all I have to raise $600, but I do not expect people to give me more than $20 a pop. To those who have given me more, thank you so much. To those who have not, thank you as well.

I feel that this kind of helping each other out is useful and ghastly necessary; especially those in the long tail of blogging who have been burned by the evil 'blog hive' pixies who controlled the Advertising Liberally network at BlogAds during the first half of the year.

A lot of us got burned out of advertising revenue by bad decisions that all squarely on the shoulders of the people who did not serve us well. Now that Sean-Paul (of The Agonist fame) is doing a fantastic job at serving us all equitably, we are all seeing ads served on our blogs once again.

It means I've spent 6 months scrapping by on culturekitchen and The Daily Gotham; bootstrapping on blood, sweat and tears. It's the reason why I have had to resort to asking for donations.

I just wrote back to one friend how this reminds me of Steve Gilliard's fundraisers, which would have happened right about this time of year. I'd joke we kept recycling the same $25 bucks, sending it to each other whenever we'd put out a call for help.

I have mentioned it before, that when I travel for panels or conferences, it takes me a few days to get back into blogging.

Day trips actually get to me more than transatlantic or transcontinental trips. At least I can sleep if the trips are more than 4 hours long. On short trips, I rarely get to rest --even at the hotel. I guess I am a creature of habit that is sensitive to change.

Which explains my kids comment from the other day.

When I travel I get "penalized" for my absence. I don't think The Kids mind my absences so much as their father who then ... ahem ... disappears during the evenings for the next few days after one of my business trips.

This changes the dynamics of evening reading since, due to his work schedule, that's become his one job in the evenings. And it's one job he usually does as I prepare for my second shift of work in my usual 10-12 hour work days.

(Author's note: This was originally published on myspace with an intended audience of high school students. Please don't assume I'm talking "down" at my peers. Many of the reposts from my early days will have a target audience. I shifted the target as my audience became primarily adult).

There is something inherently insane about being both a Libertarian and a public school teacher. After all, if the Libertarians had their way, there would no longer exist a free, compulsory public education system. Education would be left up to parents. It would cost. Parents could choose what kind of education their child should receive, where they would receive it, and at what age they could finally throw in the towel and send the kid to work. In the meantime, I work for a public school...and it sure as hell is compulsory for almost every kid in attendance.

Lessons I learned as a product of the public school system:

1. If you are really smart, you become educated in spite of the public school system and not because of it. In general, there is much angst that goes along with this. Being smarter than your teachers sucks. I have been privileged to have a few students who were smarter than me. I enjoyed the challenge. What a treat!

2. If you are one of the eighty percent of the world who can be considered "normal" (you can look that one up, but it won't help - never have found a definition of that word that works for me), then you will sort of coast through, struggling a bit here and there with a subject or a particular teacher, maybe with a suspension or two for a little rebellion. A fight here, a cigarette there. No biggie. You muddle through, wind up in a JC or University, muddle through some more, and eventually have relatively successful lives.

Look, I want to love this world

as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get

to be alive

and know it.

Mary Oliver, "October"

I woke up with hope on my tongue this morning. It was a sweetness on the flesh of my lips, a tiny taste of something larger than myself, some reason to get up this morning and partake of a mad world.

I have been resentful as hell that it's autumn. But this morning, something shifted.
I have spent the past couple of weeks in fear. Dread, from the Old English, ondrædan may be a better word. My fearful self counseled against staying here through another winter. Winter here is cruel. There is no mercy in the January wind, no safe place to walk when treacherous February freezes every surface.

As much as I love autumn, its beauty is ominous. And for the past two weeks, I've allowed that sense of fear to cloud my ability to see the beauty around me. To lose track of time and space and my own heartbeat amidst the roar and rush of fear.

This was first published at c u l t u r e k i t c h e n:
today was like any other day.

it was a beautiful day, just as it was two years ago. blue sky, gentle breeze.

the kids were romping and jumping. we took time to play, time to read and time to learn. the house was a mess, we were running low on groceries, and the kids were getting antsy. so we picked up a bit, i left the kids in the playground with our neighbors while i went to the store.

it has been just a day like any other day. still, evan asked:

"are they coming back?"
"is the empire state building still sad?"

this day, two years ago, i was feeling a bit tired, a bit disoriented and, well, a bit lazy. september 10, 2001 marked out first day of homeschooling. i had this great week planned out for our official first week. i had decided not to go to the observatory, just to keep things simple, and just go to the empire state building because it was closer to us.

the "observatory" was the top of world trade center #2.

this year, two years ago, we heard a loud boom. not a sonic boom, but a boom louder than the one a truck would make after hitting a pothole. i thought "that must have been one helluva big truck".

minutes later our baby-sitter walks in and says, did you notice one of the towers is on fire? although we are on a tall building in the east village, we face north. i had to go up to the roof to check it out. i did and came back and we put the tv on. and as the news anchors are trying to make sense of the information being fed to them and the image that was on the screen, the second plane hit. all us saw it, even my kids.

This is still my state of mind.
De-mojito-ing is turning out to be rather difficult.

This morning I was checking email and attempting to blog with the choppy wifi access I have here at the hotel. Instead of banging my head on the wall, I decided to get up up for a minute for a drink of water. When I come back to the computer I see a gorgeous familiar face I've not seen in 16 years. Debra Matos, my former roommate (and one of the few who lived to tell the tale), was standing right before me. Let's say I was way beyond ferklempt.

Of all the places I could bump into her, the Rincon Beach Resort was the last one I thought I'd find her. Debra has been living in France for all this time now and, my blog, I mean, it's just freaky that she was there hugging me after all these years. She has two lovely girls and just like with my two boys, this is also their first time in the island as 'sapient beings'.

Synchronicity. Coincidences. Karma works in mysterious ways.

What's even weirder is that a couple of days ago another former NYU friend of mine, Frances, had asked me about Debra. We were all together working on our MAs and PhDs in the 90's. Her life partner Jorge Morales is an avid blog reader and coincidentally had stumbled upon culturekitchen and thus me via The Agonist. Shout out to Sean Kelley --the network works!

So here I am in Puerto Rico and reconnecting with my peeps without really trying. I have not seen him but I did read Pedro Reina, who was a former BA classmate at NYU. The first day I got here I opened El Nuevo Día and out of it's editorial section came out his face.

I've been able to reconnect to two of the women whom I share with some intense memories pre-Mark, pre-kids, pre-blogging. I've been thinking about them constantly now for about a year; wondering how they were doing. Believe me people, if you're on my mind there is no running away. You will end up in my path and in my life.

My karma works in mysterious ways.

Day two of this financial thing.

Had a lot of feelings.

Notice that I am cranky and not trying to hide it. (I'm showing myself, one of the things I admire about poc and raised poor folk, generally speaking) But in my case, it's all the oppressive stuff coming out at usually white, working-class or poor people. At least I'm not doing the polite middle-class thing but no, this just is not right and it's my chronic privilege stuff. I can feel it and it doesn't feel good. (Feeling good is not the goal, ending racism is.) But it has been there all along. I haven't gotten through it yet.

There's a deeper level I need to go. (But Max knew that.)

It shows right when I'm hot and sweaty, tired and impatient. The thing that prompted this was searching for an air conditioner and going from store to store and they were all sold out. Even the fans. I just kept getting less and less friendly to whoever I came in contact with.

Like the "I'll get mine and screw you" syndrome which typically typifies classist and racist chronic conditioning. (Argh but get me MY air conditioning. No! I don't THINK so white girl!) ;-)

[via Suburban Guerrilla � It's A Hard Life Wherever You Go]:

Then a friend called to let me know Liza Sabater's 8-year-old niece was killed this morning when a storm knocked down a tree and hit the tent her family was camping in. (I'd gotten to know Liza a little bit at the Take Back America conference.) I think of the stunned grief, the aching emptiness her mother must feel, and I multiply it by the hundreds of thousands of mothers in the Middle East. It feels as if the world couldn't be big enough to contain all that sorrow.

And all day long, I've been thinking about those young Israeli girls, writing "With love from Israel" on those missiles. What the hell were their parents thinking?

It tears at my heart, what’s going on in the Middle East, in Africa. What makes our so-called leaders think they can move people around like game pieces, how can they be so willing to obliterate them? No, worse - exterminate them, like roaches.

And how can Bush sit on his hands, then cry crocodile tears over frozen embryos?